I’m beginning to think car rental and the Champions Hockey League don’t mix. Two Monday nights in a row, I’ve now found myself driving – mostly skidding – through a blizzard in an unfamiliar car toward a hotel in an unfamiliar city. Next time, I think taxis might be the way to go.
I’m in snow-drenched Gothenburg today to commentate upon a surreal situation: a hockey game in which one team gets a five-goal head start. The CHL’s two-game, aggregate score format is unusual to begin with, but Frölunda’s big first-leg lead over Davos is unprecedented in the competition’s two-year history. After speaking with Frölunda coach Roger Rönnberg this morning, I sensed he wasn’t quite sure how to approach the match. Hockey isn’t soccer – you can’t just get every man behind the puck and hope not to concede too many goals, and as Red Bull Salzburg discovered last year against Luleå, huge deficits aren’t insurmountable in the CHL.
Speaking of soccer, having also spoken for the first time with Davos coach Arno Del Curto this morning, Del Curto reminds me of Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger: both men have had success at their clubs for nearly two decades, and both are addicted to their respective sports. I get the sense that Del Curto could happily curl up in front of a good fire for days with just a bottle of wine and DVDs of a few dozen European hockey games to keep him company. He seemed pretty loose after Davos’ morning skate – he’s frustrated by the mistakes his team made in the first leg as well as the injuries they have suffered (“January is not a good month for us”, he said, noting the triple tolls of the CHL, NLA and Spengler Cup on his squad), but he also had a glint in his eye throughout our lengthy chat – the kind of glint you see in a gambler who knows he has nothing left to lose.
As a commentator, preparing for a game like this isn’t straightforward. We do all of our own research as commentators – I use sites like www.championshockeyleague.net, www.eliteprospects.com and www.icehockey24.com to research players, coaches, team form and club histories and prepare myself to fill all of the breaks in play with information I hope will be interesting and insightful to everyone watching at home. Occasionally you also get lucky: last night, flipping channels on my hotel TV I found a replay of Saturday’s SHL game between Rögle and Frölunda, which allowed me to see the unfortunate boarding penalty by Rögle’s Patrick Cehlin which left Frölunda’s Oscar Fantenberg concussed and out of tonight’s game. Being able to describe that injury is better than simply saying Fantenberg is “out with concussion”; hopefully that difference will be appreciated by a few viewers, at least!
But just as the coaches and players on both sides have never been in a situation like this, I’ve never commentated on a game like this, either. If Frölunda scores several early goals, the evening might get pretty dull pretty quickly. On the other hand, if Davos scores a few goals, momentum might build, tension might mount, and I might just find myself directly involved in a slice of hockey history. I guess my attitude has to be the same as Coach Rönnberg’s – this morning he said, “All we can concentrate on is what we can control,” and if I do that tonight I’ll have a good game myself, regardless of what happens on the ice beneath my commentary position.