February 9 2010

Yahoo! Weather - London, UK

Currently:	Cloudy, 34°F (feels like 25°F)
Wind:	12mph, NNE
Sunrise:	7:27 am
Sunset:	5:01 pm

Ice Hockey in a warzone

Ice hockey has been a part of my life for about 7 years now and I wouldn’t have thought twice about the game being played in a red hot desert, let alone a red hot desert in the middle of a warzone, just beyond the wire, but yes it exists!

On the very active and dangerous airfield in Afghanistan known as Kandahar air base it is a well favoured sport played by the Americans, Canadians the Dutch and even the British give it a go. Most of the armed forces personnel that are sent to Afghanistan are not going to be that worried about missing most of the NHL season, but for that portion that can’t live without ice hockey this is a dream come true and if they didn’t have this, it would be a very depressing tour indeed.

The reactions of some of the men that have got to see and play on the now world famous rink are “I didn’t even think they’d have a hockey rink here.” or “you’d never thought you’d come to a desert and find a hockey team” my reactions exactly but I’m very impressed at the armed forces in providing this. It consists of exactly the same set up of an ice hockey rink with the boards going around the pad and the ice markings and goals are exactly the same, the only difference is there is no ice, thus no skates are needed, but other than this the players use ice hockey sticks and gloves and ice 5 players at any one time... Brilliant!

They call it Ball hockey. It isn’t even just a knock around out there; they take it quite seriously fielding 15 ball hockey teams in total, 14 Canadian and one American and they have their own championship. There was a visit from the Canadian alumni ice hockey team consisting of world famous players, Stanley cup winners and NHL record holders, they even brought the Stanley cup with them all the way from the Toronto’s hall of fame, if you’re not American or an ice hockey fan the only way I can describe winning the Stanley cup is like winning the premiership 3 times in a row.

It was such a moral boost for men and women out there, and for all of them a great experience playing against players of this standard even if the Kandahar hawks did lose the game 7.1. The highlight of the whole game was a good old hockey fight between Tiger Williams who is an ex NHL star and a Canadian soldier. His comments were “he has beaten up a lot of people in his career and I am now lucky enough to be one of them.” So if you thought that by taking the ice out of ice hockey would disrupt the game you are very wrong.

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submitted by keeno69xxx on October 21st 2009

keeno69xxx's blog
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