The Irish Goodbye: The Warmup
Before I start, I should say – this is my first blog post. The writing might not be perfect – I turn 29 in June, I work in IT and haven’t done any kind of writing beyond small notes or birthday cards in 13 years, and I refuse to use AI to make it nicer. This is purely a passion project, and this is hopefully the first of many posts like this. That being said:
Losing 2 games on the bounce is never nice. Shipping 12 goals in those 2 losses is never nice. Only scoring 2 yourself in those 2 games – you guessed it – never nice.
All of the above to the same team in pretty much the same manner, on back to back nights, in their barn? Roughest of rough do’s. What happened, though?
Our defence has been… not great, in multiple games this year, but i don’t think we’ve ever looked like conceding 7 – the weekend prior not withstanding, let alone 12 in 2 nights, again, the weekend prior not withstanding. (Though, we glossed them over with the 6-0 win in Dundee… we were so back.)
Put simply – Belfast are absolutely ruthless. Give them half a chance and they’ll score twice.
Early in the year, especially in their CHL campaign, there were complaints about their team being too attack oriented, and at times, looking like a team that were running 5 forwards.
That, if still true (I’ll be the first to admit I’ve not seen much of Belfast this year to know if it is) clearly works to their advantage sometimes.
But even still – you’d not expect to have 12 hung on you like that – so how did they do it – and more importantly, what can Sheffield actually take away from this?
Lets go, goal by goal. Good and bad. Game 1.
Steelers Goal No. 1
Right place, right time for Mitch Balmas.
After a Belfast dump-in hits Reece Kelly, Huttula picks the puck up as it comes off his (Kelly’s) skate, and finds a racing Jasper far side about to blow the zone, as there’s 4 Belfast players caught in deep on a forecheck.
Jasper crosses the opposing blueline, 3 on 1 with Tait driving the middle and Balmas coming across from the farside wing
Jasper holds his line as Tait drives the net, and Balmas looks to cut back across behind Smith who, with the rest of Belfast team, have done well to get back so quick. *amateur illustration below*
Jasper delays his pass by maybe half a second too long trying to put Tait in behind everyone, but luckily Balmas, knowing that the only place Jasper can go is behind the net, occupies the space he was in, pounces on the loose puck as Boudrias can’t really do anything with it given the fact it’s in his hands, and hes sliding backwards, and it sits perfectly for him to hit first time top bins straight by Whistle. 1-0 the boys in Orange (or white in this case, away game and that)
So there’s the good stuff out the way.
Giants Goal No. 1
Karl Boudrias appears a lot in this game. Interference call? Yep. Fight? Yep. Two goals? you bet. An assist to top it off? Obviously.
Belfast win an o-zone draw, and immediately Long heads back for the blue line, as one player heads for the net, Lake ties up Heard and Boudrias gets ready for a pass.
Ritchie does a pretty good job of trying to steer Long to the opposite side of the ice toward Harper, where, given Long is right handed, you’d expect him to hand it off to the D man who is absolutely begging for the puck for a onetimer.
Instead he plays the very obvious backhander over to Boudrias.
I dont think this is defended properly.. at all. Either on the eye test, or how Steelers wish to defend with the specific scheme they use (which I’ll cover in a different post, as it’s a bit wordy for this) but essentially, all 3 forwards should be high in the zone here, but Lake has done too good a job tying Heard up off the face-off, and Ritchie quite simply cannot cover all that space in that little time to get across to Boudrias.
Which is good, because the pass goes straight to Boudrias’ stick.
He gets to the top of the circle and, as mentioned, Ritchie cannot get to him fast enough, and there’s 2 layer of traffic in front of Greenfield who, given this puck goes in top right corner (from the shooters POV), I’d put a decent amount of money on him never knowing it left his stick.
In fairness I could stop this here. This is long enough already, and the rest of the goals are all pretty similar to this – someone changes lanes, everyone gets confused, Greenfield is left on an island 50 miles away from everyone and the puck goes in. However I’ve re-watched the highlights for this game no less than 5 times and if I’m going to be miserable, you are too.
So lets forge on
1-1 Game.
Giants Goal No. 2
After a decent sustained bit of pressure, the puck ends up far side on the stick of Reid Irwin, who really only has 2 options here.
1 – send it back to JJ Piccinich, who’s currently on the blue line, or two, cycle it down the boards and hope that Long can flex out and grab it, and either send it back, or reverse it back round for Bo Hanson on the opposite side of the ice. He does also have the option of playing a pass into the middle of the ice, hoping Lake forces it back toward JJ and they manufacture something out of that
What he actually does is waits maybe a second and Lake comes forward to create a passing lane between Cormier and Ritchie, who are both currently staring at Irwin
This forces Tremblay to jump (who i dont think should be there in the first place), Lake plays it straight back to him and as if by magic, Long is wide open on the back post
Long receives the pass, and to his credit, Huttula immediately jumps for him but it’s way too late, and Long has time to call his Mum, Dad, Dog, Neighbour, you name it he’s rang them, takes it between his legs and lifts it into Greenfield, who again, to his credit, makes the save, but cannot hold on it, it trickles onto the line and long pokes it home.
Giants Goal No. 3
After a decent back and forth between both teams with some frankly unbelievable saves from both netminders, there’s a broken play in the neutral zone which Lee is able to tidy up and gain the zone. At this point, Boudrias (yay) has managed to build up a decent amount of speed and is crossing far side, behind basically everyone
Lee holds as Southorn follows him, before handing it off to Boudrias, who at this point is a netbound freight train
Huttula is caught flat footed on the handover from Southorn, and has to spin around to face him to at least attempt to poke check him
By that point it’s too late, Boudrias makes himself as wide as possible and holds the puck off on his forehand, and the Hoot Dog can do nothing about it
Cuts across the front of Greenfield, backhand forehand 3-1
Giants Goal No. 4
Im not even gonna use screenshots for this one. Boudrias (get used to the name) goes to rim it after being put under a small amount of pressure. Whether or not he hit this spot because he knows it exists, or because it’s a lucky bounce, I do not know. Regardless, it hits a funny spot in the stanchion/glass, hits the side net and sits in the paint nice as you like for David Goodwin to charge in, stick on the ice, Call of Duty Black Ops salmon dive. 4-1 Giants.
Giants Goal No. 5
I’d complain about a daft penalty taken but at this point 5-1 is no different to 4-1 so, it doesn’t matter. Steelers are on the PK.
Giants PP here is quite clever with how they constantly move between 2 different formations, a 1-3-1 and an Umbrella (functionally the same thing but an Umbrella is more a 2-2-1 with both forwards on the posts). Steelers do a good job of just holding tight and not really giving up any solid passing lanes. After a decent spell of possession, Giants find themselves here:
Goodwin has the puck on his strong side, with one forward in front of the net providing the screen, one behind as a passing option, another forward far side who is just in shot coming in down hill with no coverage for a onetime option, and the d man stood back on the blue line ready to receive to redistribute
Goodwin reverses this puck, back to the blueline
Gabe Bast gets this on and off his stick in an instant, sending it straight on net as the lane has opened up in front of him. I don’t think he’s trying to score here as much as he’s trying to get the penalty kill to flex in and out rapidly, which causes confusion amongst the killers. Luckily for him, he hits Greenfield.
Greenfield makes the initial save but between Dougherty being bent over(?) forcing the screen into him, and the forward who was behind the net comes out front to pick up the rebound, he stands basically no chance
and it’s 5-1 Giants with no time left in the game
And with that, the game is done. It would be a disservice to both teams to say this score line was entirely accurate. Steelers PP in the first generated plenty of opportunities to put them 2-0 up before the whistle, and the amount of breakaways, odd man rushes and so on you’d have thought they’d have been able to net more than 1. But, Belfast have 2 secret weapons. 1 – Jackson Whistle, 2 – they’re bloody good.
This game, and Belfast as a team, did a pretty good thing of highlighting the issues the Steelers have, though. When it comes to defending, their system just is not compatible with 3-2 o-zone structures, and in a league which seems to be quite heavy on that this year (as it favours those teams with speed and skill, which most teams have in spades this year), it becomes quite difficult for them when they get hemmed in.
None of that even demonstrates the point that, most of the time, Sheffield just look lost on offence with no sparks of ingenuity coming from anyone, and no imagination in attack, at all. Whether or not that is endemic of the style that Fox has them play, or it’s just teams have the book on us these days, im not sure, but it needs to be figured out and it needs to be figured out fast. (It needed to be figured out at Christmas but, I’ll come on to that in a different post).
Belfast deserved to win this game, and win it they did. And the next one…