Its hard not to get stupidly excited by the fact that it looks 90% certain that the Phoenix will be back next season. Like many, I won't truly, truly believe it until the team skate onto the ice for the first warmup at Manchester Square Gardens, but its almost here. Well, when the ground is broken, then I'll inch it up to 95% certain.
I've already had about 350 ideas for stuff we can do on and off the ice for next year. Admittedly the number of rubbish/impossible/silly suggestions is about three hundred... and forty nine... and a half. But at least the creative juices are flowing.
Got really, really pissed off at some on The Hockey Forum this week. The Racers have left the EIHL and a few Fife and Dundee fans saw fit to join the queue to piss on a still warm corpse. I haven't seen something so utterly classless in hockey for quite some time, especially from fans of teams that almost went the same way a few short months earlier. But then Fife were apparently as popular as syphilis in the old BNL setup and teams couldn't wait to leave, so hey, maybe that could be a reason? Surely not, that would be too simple...
But for some people, its not about the peace, it is about the war. From petty grudges all the way up to terrorism and war, some people don't want a solution, they just want to keep the same fights going on endlessly. We're still discussing the ISL/BNL split despite the fact that it was almost a decade ago. Oh and both leagues are deader than tank tops.
The Racers had their faults, but desire and commitment to make it work wasn't one of them. You can't even turn round and say that they did much wrong, from a marketing and openness point of view they led the way. To seem them floored by something that was out of their control is so disappointing.
It also reinforces the need for the Phoenix to have their own barn. Then they control everything, from ice and practice time, down to ticketing and customer service. Its hard, hard work but the "customer" problems become the Phoenix problems, instead of something to bring up at a meeting with the landlord. Double edged sword, obviously, but I find it significant that during the "best" times of hockey in the last 15 years, most teams were very closely tied to the rink ownership.
Anyway, maybe, just maybe the final go-ahead will be announced soon and we can look forward to 2006.
(Oh and if anyone is reading this, put a big screen down one end. We can do so much with it!)
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Of course the thing that's most annoying about the vultures circling around London is the team is currently only being mothballed in the same way that we were. I'd expect the league to give them at least a couple of seasons in the same way Phoenix have been, so technially there isn't a space opening up for a new team.
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