CORNER BROOK Had this been action from the local horseshoes or hand grenades league, the West Side Monarchs might be feeling a bit better about their effort on Monday night.
Unfortunately for the gold and black, close just doesn’t cut it in the Corner Brook Molson Men’s Broomball League final, a best-of-three affair which opened with a 4-3 victory for the Investors Group at the Pepsi Centre, in a game where the eventual victors led 4-0 at half-time, but almost watched it all slip away in the second stanza.
Michael Hawco (2), Martin Mantey and Lance Ereaut accounted for the offence in the triumph.
Geoff Byrne, Eric (Sticky) Young and Blaine Richards responded for the Monarchs, as they just fell short of a remarkable comeback in a game where they almost triggered the ‘keep the clock running’ mercy rule in the first half.
“I don’t know what happened,” said investors’ Ron Hancock of the near-collapse. “It’s impossible not to sit back once you get that big lead.
“You try to keep going forward, but eventually you start sitting back,” he continued. “Then they get one or two and it’s hard to be on your toes.”
The challenge for the investors in Game 2 will be to put the second half out of their minds and focus on the opening period, where they were about as dominant as possible.
“We’ll probably give them a four-goal lead,” Hancock joked of his team’s strategy for the second contest next Monday.
“I think we have to play pretty much the same, I guess,” he quickly added. “We played good, they got a few bounces at the end, but I think we could have just as easily won that game 4-1 and that’s all anybody would be talking about.”
