Saturday 8th December – Slough Jets programme notes

Good evening and welcome to tonight’s game against the travelling Telford Tigers. I hope everyone has had a safe journey and I hope we have an exciting night ahead of us.

I’m writing this on Tuesday, a day ahead of our midweek game against Milton Keynes Lightning, but how was last weekend for excitement? A home game against Sheffield proving Frankie has a shot hard enough to break the net and then the same guy doing the business 24 hours later to secure a regulation tie and then being the only shooter to score in penalties for the win. Gregg Rockman also deserves a mention for his outstanding 125+ minutes as without solid goaltending you’ll always struggle to outscore your opponents in this league.

That’s the thing with this Jets team, there are so many people that can contribute and make success and last weekend was a big weekend for Frankie and Rocky but you can bet there will be other players this weekend ready to make this their weekend.

Looking back to Frankie’s goal on Saturday we are lucky in that we have technology that can more often than not give a conclusively right answer to a goal or no goal situation. We are not in a position where we can share that technology quickly enough to push for it to be admissible in a game but we have it. The goal cam, which proved the decisive element in confirming the correctness of the decision for example is mounted upside down and consequently records the footage upside down. This means you need editing software to hand to rotate the footage and then you also need the slow motion to actually find out what happened, neither of which we have with us at the game. I did have a look at both cameras in the second interval and could see on the goal cam that the goal was scored but only at slow motion could I see how what happened did happen.

Spare a thought for the referee who was in a pressure situation. Given the trajectory of the puck it’s easy to understand how she could have believed it wasn’t a goal as the puck is not supposed to go into the goal and through the goal nets so to end up where it did (without the net being broken) could only have happened if the puck had not gone in. As I said on Jets TV Joy Tottman did not have the benefit of any of the technology and had to use the resources available to her only to make a decision. She kept calm, consulted both linesmen individually and the goal judge and then awarded the goal which was a great piece of officiating in my opinion to have taken her time, consulted all the necessary people and reached the right decision without the benefit of cameras, slow-mos and zooms that we all get to enjoy the benefit of after the event.

After tonight we have only 2 home games left in the lead up to Christmas and don’t forget next weekend is the Christmas shirt auction. Those shirts will be worn next Saturday during the game and available for bidding after the game and if you win and pay next week you can take the shirt away and still have time to send it as a Christmas present if that’s it destiny.

Enjoy tonight’s game, let’s be loud for the Jets (and Tigers if that’s your team) tonight

My team, your team, OUR TEAM

Mark