Hockey Night in Edinburgh

About a week ago Derek and I received an exciting invitation to accompany a couple friends of mine (fellow PhD-1s from the US and Canada) to an Edinburgh Capitals game at the rather old Murrayfield Ice Rink, complete with ancient seats.   Yes, we were going to see some 'ice hockey' in Scotland.  You're probably thinking, I didn't know Edinburgh had a hockey team.  Well, it does.  And while it's no NHL, it's the closest you can get when you're living in the UK (unless you get satellite coverage of the NHL games, that is).

The Edinburgh Capitals are one of 10 teams in the Elite Ice Hockey League.  This professional UK league is the highest level of hockey you can get in the UK.  We ended up seeing their final game of the year, which was against the number one ranked team, the Sheffield Steelers.   It was a high-scoring game with lots of excitement amongst the screaming fans.  We won 5-4 in the second of the quarter-finals, but it wasn't enough to move up.  The week before, our friends reported chants of 'We're number 8!  We're number 8!,' because only the top 8 teams were going to advance to the quarter-finals.

When it comes to the quality of the hockey, it was kind of like watching two okay Canadian university hockey teams play.  Several Capitals players were Canadian, actually, but it's not surprising that they're not in the NHL.  It was pretty funny how many times the players lost track of the puck, passed in front of the net with no one taking a shot, or tripped over their own feet.  Body checking wasn't done -- it was more like one guy skating up behind the guy with the puck, putting his hands out against the boards, and the two just standing there until the puck was taken away by someone else.  I did capture one of the fights on my camera, which was kind of neat (and surprising!).  I guess things were a little tense on the ice this week.

I can't conclude my synopsis of this experience without a word about the fans.  The Capitals have a large crowd of devoted and vocal fans wearing hockey jerseys, eating mashed potatoes with gravy out of styrofoam cups and singing their hearts out.  They had songs for events, for individual players, and to counteract (drown out) the opposition's fans' songs.  A popular insult thrown at the other team's goalie was to call him a sieve, which I thought was pretty amusing.  The singing and cheering never stopped throughout the game, and we all got into it, particularly in the last two periods when we changed seats to sit amongst the cheerers.  All in all, it was a wild, very fun and very different experience.  We'll have to go again next year!