There's a serious side to Canada's slaughter of Slovakia
February 15, 2010
What on earth happened to Slovakia in the Women's Ice Hockey? Canada trounced the Slovaks 18 – 0, surely one of the worst defeats ever? Canada scored 7 goals in the first period, 6, in the second and 5 in the third while Slovakia didn't manage to score one goal at all. For those who know nothing about Ice Hockey, a period is only 20 minutes, so to score 7 goals in 20 minutes means that one team was doing all the work and the other team might as well not have been there. That is until you consider the result of the Bulgaria-Slovakia match in September 2008 when Slovakia beat Bulgaria 82 – 0 in a qualifying match. And even that isn't the most one-sided result in the history of Women's Ice Hockey.Many readers will simply yawn and go on to find other Winter Olympics news but there is a serious side to this. The Olympic Games organisers have to consider which sports to include and which to exclude. There is no value in including sports which have only two or three teams capable of putting on a good match and the results from women's ice hockey look like putting it into that category. Some reports say that after the US team were 8 goals up against China in the second period of their match they, the Americans, simply took to a kind of time-wasting to run down the minutes; in other words they deliberately did not thrash the Chinese team as they could easily have done. That couldn't have made the game much of a thrill for the spectators, any more than watching the All Blacks play Georgia would be. There are commentators who have criticised the Canadians for not playing some form of keepie-uppie so as to avoid an embarassing score-line but in rugby the giants don't generally take the foot off the pedal when they're playing the minnows. What they do do is avoid breaking bones but the All Blacks scored 145 points against Japan in 1995 and Australia beat Namibia 142-0 a few years ago. However, the comparisons end there because while there are only 5 or 6 teams on whom you'd put money to win the rugby world cup there perhaps 10 who could beat any of the others on a good day. That's not the case in Women's Ice Hockey and there's the problem.
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