Adios, au revoir, arrivederci

And so we bid farewell to Deeside. Sundays game against Mobilx Vipers was the last official visit for the match night crew.

I'd grown quite accustomed to the place. Its not the most salubrious rink in the world, but I like to think the Phoenix Faithful managed to rock the walls a bit. From an announcing point of view it was just about right, with sightlines over most of the ice, a clear view of all the fans, the players tunnel and so on. The PA setup was simple, even on the days we had to rush. The staff always friendly, with room for pre-game meetings and so on. Just a pleasant place to be.

Of course our final game couldn't go without some major problems, and we ended up with two. The first was as the game started. We have four DVD recorders taking the feed from Jons camera (the poor sod in the cherry picker). I'm not sure of the exact destinations of the disks, but at a guess, one for Tony Hand, one for the opposition coach, one for the Elite League and one spare in case of failure. The record of the game has to be made available shortly after the end of the match. So when Les told Richard that all four DVD recorders had failed, it was a major issue. As I understand it, not providing the game video is a fineable offence, and it is Richards responsibility.

So while he sorted that, Fishcake and I ran the opening few minutes of the game before Mr Match Night Director reappeared, presumably having hit things with a hammer.

Then during one of the intervals we had a complete PA failure. I rather suspect I knocked something plug related whilst leaning to answer someones question and nudged something, which killed the entire board. Fishcake and I looked at each other in horror, when Richard thankfully appeared out of nowhere, clutching a new extension lead.

Although we came back in, there was no way Richard would let us continue with a slightly dodgy connection. Because old clumsy arse here would undoubtedly make the whole thing go bang. So he hooked in the new extension lead and we were up. With one problem. The extension was one of those barrel reels, fully coiled and Richard pointed out that as it heated up it would become a large electro magnet, right next to all of our PA. We couldn't unravel it as everything was plugged in, and we couldn't unhook everything because the crowd would notice the pops and bangs through the speakers.

It was then that Richard had an idea that I quite genuinely describe as absolute genius.

He called Ben over and instructed him to go to the drummers in the corner. At the next suitable stoppage they would fire up the drums, the Faithful would begin giving their all... and we could unplug and reconnect the speakers without anyone (hopefully) noticing the pops and bangs - drowned out by their own noise.

As I say, a moment of brilliance.

Oh, and who thought we would make it to 2007 without playing "We're Gonna Win"?