A Season of Three Halves

Glasgow Clan 2018-19 Season Review

By Neil Hughes

Hockey is a serious business. There are only two officially sanctioned jokes that you can use when it comest to the British game. The first is I went to a boxing match last night and an ice hockey game broke out. Oh how we laughed at that one. It is becoming less relevant nowadays as fighting has become something of a rarity in recent years but hey, we honour the game’s traditions and all that. The second joke is hockey is a game of three halves. For those of you that don’t get it a game of hockey is played over three twenty minute periods. Glasgow Clan’s 2018-19 season can also be split up into three distinct ‘halves’ of approximately twenty league games each and can be described thus: Average, Fantastic and Disappointing. The story of the season is, however, a tad more complicated than that including as it does the Challenge Cup campaign and the briefest of stints in the Play Offs. Compared with the horror show that was the 2017-18 season it was a huge improvement and for a while promised to be something special. That it all rather fizzled out should not take away from the fact that the club finished fourth in the league, a credible result, regained the conference trophy, a rather pointless piece of silverware following changes to the league structure but better Clan having it than Fife, and played a much more entertaining brand of hockey.

In the summer of 2018 there were many changes for the Clan fans to ponder. A new coach was appointed, Pete Russell. Having enjoyed success as the coach the GB team, Russell joined from Milton Keynes. Joining him would be a whole new set of players with only Brits Matt Haywood, Gary Russell and Zach Sullivan and import Michael Gutwald returning from the squad that had so miserably underperformed the previous season. Three of the new arrivals were well known to the Clan faithful. Scott Pitt and Matt Beca returned after a year in Manchester. Both were points machines during their previous stint at Braehead and had carried that form with them down to Manchester so getting them back was something of a coup. The other was Zack Fitzgerald, returning after a couple of years in Sheffield and being appointed the captain’s ‘C’. As the rest of the squad was recruited the fans could only hope that they would click together and give them something to cheer about. Cheers had been thin on the ground for several seasons. Another change was that Braehead Clan was now Glasgow Clan. This change in moniker was long overdue and with it was a new logo, not to this observer’s taste unfortunately, and hopefully a new direction.

The other big change was the league format. Edinburgh’s exclusion from the league meant an eleven team competition. The existing three conferences of four became two of four and one of three but were competitions in name only and held little significance. There would be no conference bias in the fixtures – each team in the league would meet the others six times for a sixty game season. This makes direct comparisons with previous season tricky as Clan played the wealthy ‘good’ sides more and the poor ‘bad’ less or not at all but improvement is obvious – 4th place in the league as opposed to 9th, 67 points from 60 games compared with 54 from 56 (16 of which came in eight games against the hapless Edinburgh). It could have been even better had it not been for the ending but more of that later. Four pre-season games took place at Braehead towards the end of August against foreign opposition as a warm up to the season proper which as usual saw Clan play the month of September on the road as Disney took up residence on the hallowed ice. That month and the following saw a mixture of league and Challenge Cup group games.

The Challenge Cup campaign saw Clan in a group with Fife, Dundee and Belfast. The first competitive game of the season took place in Fife where a controversial ending saw the hosts take the game into overtime and claim the victory. Defeats in Dundee and Belfast followed before Fife pitched up at Braehead on 5th October for Clan’s first competitive home game of the season. A 2-1 victory finally got the cup campaign underway though a defeat at home to Belfast meant that qualification for the quarter final looked unlikely. The last group game saw Clan take a 5-4 penalty shot victory over Dundee and after several days wait for other clubs to finish their group games, Clan had sneaked into the quarter final by the skin of their teeth as eighth seeds. That two legged affair saw them face Cardiff as the top seeded Belfast elected to face Dundee in the competition’s pick your opponent rules. The game took place at the end of November and beginning December, Clan coming back from a 3-0 deficit after just one period of the home first leg but losing the game 4-3. In the return leg and completely out of the blue Clan outplayed the highly fancied Cardiff and after sixty minutes the score was 5-4 on their favour, 8-8 on aggregate. The game went to overtime and Matt Haywood scored the winning goal to put Clan in the semi final. Another two legged affair, Clan faced Belfast initially at Braehead at the end of January. A 2-1 victory gave them a slender advantage going into the second leg two weeks later. Alas, the impressive Belfast were too strong and ran out 6-3 winners on the night taking the tie 7-5 on aggregate. Belfast would go on and lift the trophy beating Guildford in the final. Clan could reflect on getting further in the competition than they had done in all bar one other season of their existence.

The Challenge Cup is all well and good but for most fans the league provided the games that mattered. Comparing Clan’s record against each of their opponents shows improvement in just about every case. Whilst the Gardiner Conference was still there its significance was much reduced but Clan’s record against the other two conference members meant that they claimed the trophy with several weeks to go.

Belfast and Cardiff dominated the league and proved to be difficult opponents to all the clubs, not just Clan. Not obtaining a single point against Cardiff was tempered a little by the Challenge Cup Quarter Final victory. Clan had more success against the eventual champions Belfast with two victories, one a particularly pleasing 5-0 thumping in the middle of February when the club were at the height of their powers. Of the other wealthy clubs, the spoils were equally shared with Nottingham whilst Clan completely dominated Sheffield including 6-0 and 6-1 victories in South Yorkshire. Although Sheffield were having a particularly grim season Clan’s record against the big four was as good as it has ever been. The four opponents from the Patten Conference proved to be a mixed bag with 50% records against Coventry and Manchester, both an improvement from last season and a healthy record against league wooden spoonist Milton Keynes. Again, Guildford proved to be something of a bogey club, a point emphasised when it came to the Play Offs. Despite Guildford’s dominance, Clan finished the regular season on the same points as their Southern England foes and one place higher in the standings due to a higher number of regulation victories. Against the two Scottish clubs Clan proved particularly effective, dominating Dundee and posting a record against Fife that expunged the nightmare of the previous season where a 1-7 league record against the hated Flyers was for many fans just about the worst aspect of that season.

So what of those three halves? Clan’s first twenty or so league games were a so-so mixture of reasonable results and some horrors. The record wasn’t much of an improvement on the previous season and the fans that had initially been willing to let the team and coach settle in were beginning to get a little restless. In early December a poor performance in a home defeat to Manchester drew much criticism but a few days later Clan won that Challenge Cup Quarter Final in Cardiff and the season changed right there. Over the course of the next two months Clan became the form team in the league. Of 22 games played Clan lost just six, only three of which were in regulation time. They flew up the standings into third place and whilst Belfast and Cardiff were never threatened, Clan’s best finish for four years looked likely. Elimination from the Challenge Cup in mid February is seen as the second turning point in the season though Clan did win two of their next three league games which included that 5-0 victory against the Giants and a 6-1 win in Sheffield. It was after this game that the form book was thrown away and the season went into a steep decline. Of the next eleven games Clan won just one, ironically their sole victory against bogey club Guildford, as the regular season wore down and Nottingham claimed third place in the league. The final game of the regular season was away in Fife who had won in Braehead the previous evening. A temporary reprieve from what had been going on in the previous few weeks, Clan claimed a 4-2 win, their first in eight games, and by the narrowest margins took fourth place in the league table.

As a result Clan would meet Guildford in the Play Off Quarter Final. The two legged affair commenced in Guildford and Clan returned home with a slender advantage after a 3-2 win. Could it be that their luck was changing and the form had returned? Alas, no. At Braehead Guildford soon cancelled out Clan’s advantage, and were 3-0 up. 5-3 on aggregate, as time ran out. With the last throw of the dice Clan pulled the netminder and inevitably Guildford scored into the empty net. Rubbing salt into the wound they went and added another in the last few seconds to win 5-0 on the night, a fully deserved victory even if the final scoreline was extremely flattering. Whilst two legged, aggregate score games are not a very hockey way of deciding play off match ups, they are what they are and Clan’s abysmal record in six period hockey games continues. Clan’s absence from the postseason party was extended by another year.

It’s quite hard trying to analyse a season like that. The first part can perhaps be explained by the fact the team was basically built from scratch and whilst it took longer than it might have done, players took their time to get settled with their linemates and Russell’s systems. Around the time of the dramatic improvement in form, Clan released headline signing Josh Gratton. Whilst his reputation as a tough man had been barely tested in the early part of the season his points production had been surprisingly good but for whatever reason he was deemed surplus to requirements. Without him the team performance immediately improved and whilst that might be something of a coincidence, the decision to release him certainly appeared to pay dividends. Two or three games later he was replaced by Guillaume Doucet, a known goal scorer from his time in the league and what seemed to be a perfect fit in the gap left by Gratton. The ‘new’ Clan played with joy and freedom and scored goals, plenty of them. It was a great time to be watching hockey. As to why that form changed again no one seems to know. Yes, the club had a difficult run-in with multiple games against Belfast, Cardiff, an improving Nottingham and a mysteriously troublesome Guildford but the goals just dried up, especially at home. Defensively Clan were prone to lapses in concentration but had been all season – you just tend to notice them less when the forwards are smacking in loads of goals at the other end. Goaltending never really hit the heights. Joel Rumpel didn’t have the greatest of starts to the season but bucked up during the club’s good run. However, the season ended modestly for him. Whilst Rumpel was by no means a donkey like a couple of the previous minders of the Clan net, a more assured netminder could have earned the club the three or four more points that would have meant a third place finish.

Whatever the reason for the loss in form, the season was a qualified success. The dreadful slide down the standings over the previous couple of seasons was arrested and for a time we were treated to some of the best hockey and run of results as we have ever witnessed at Braehead. Pete Russell has cut a popular figure over the course of the season and everyone was delighted when he committed to the club for another twelve months immediately after this season ended. It may well have been a season of three halves but overall it was one where being a Clan fan became fun again.

Postscript: I saw one of the four preseason games but those aside I missed twelve home games this season. Coventry 20/10 (Retirement do), Belfast 3/11 (Huddersfield), Sheffield 16/11 (USA), MK 17/11 (USA), Guildford 24/11 (Czech), Cardiff (CC) 28/11 (Personal), Coventry 30/11 (Personal), Sheffield 23/12 (Finger operation), Manchester 27/12 (Finger), Belfast 29/1 (Antigua), Fife 1/1 (Antigua), Manchester 9/2 (Personal). Five were victories, seven were defeats. I got to no road games but watched three webcasts. I missed the live TV game in MK which was just as well.