On the last night before the Christmas Break the St. Francis Xavier X-Men rolled into the Grant-Harvey Centre to face-off against our St. Thomas Tommies Men's Hockey team. The X-Men came into town after an overtime win over U de M. The Tommies coming off a shootout loss to the Saint Mary's Huskies and were coming in to tonights game hungry for a win.
The Tommies were still missing Randy Cameron #17 and Christian Morin #2 from tonights active roster, the X-Men were missing a few regulars off their blue line with Spencer McAvoy #5 and RD Chisholm #4 not in tonights line-up.
The Tommies had starting goaltender Jonathan Groenheyde #31 between the pipes and the X-Men placed Joey Perricone #31 in the crease for tonights match-up.
The X-Men were pouring on lots of early pressure on the Tommies, Groenheyde stood his ground though and held St. FX off the scoreboard till the 12:09 mark when Stephen Sanza #23 was in the penalty box for an interference call, Josh Day #11 had a power play goal assisted by Pageau and Struthers. The 16:46 mark the Tommies answered back on a goal from Jonathan Bonneau #51 assisted by line mate Stephen Sanza. X regained the lead just over a minute later off the tape of Gabriel O'Connor #45. The period ended with X putting 19 shots up in the first frame to STU's - 3.
The second period started with Kyell Henegan #20 scoring his first goal as a member of the Tommies, helpers came from Colin Martin and Jordan Thomas. Later on in the period the Tommies added a go ahead goal on a wired shot from Captain Felix Poulin #8 (Labonte, Bernier). X was not to be shown up though and had the Tommies under pressure during a penalty kill situation and scored a short-handed goal on a play from Jason Bast #20 assisted by Brad Cuzner, this tied the game up at 3 a piece going into the third period.
A little over 5 minutes into the third period Jon Bonneau scored his second goal of the game with the helper coming from Sanza again. The Tommies carried the lead very late into the third period when the X-Men pulled goalie Joey Perricone in favour for the extra attacker, the move by Head Coach Brad Peddle seemed to be very valuable when Josh Day scored the tying goal (Bast, Struthers) which forced the game to overtime.
The overtime frame solved nothing but gave the Tommies fans a lot of excitement. The Tommies held X to 3 shots in the extra frame while only getting 2 themselves. On to the shootout!! The X-men sent Stephens, Kirkpatrick, Bast and the extra shooter Maschmeyer all to get turned away by Groenheyde. The Tommies answered the call with Colin Martin who beat Perricone but found the post, Jon Bonneau who also beat the X goal keeper but found the post, Marc-Andre Levesque and Yuri Cheremetiev who had the game winner.
This is a Tommies team that looks like they are building up some steam going into the second half of the season they are playing with fire in the belly and are making it exciting to watch.
A side note from the game Jordan Thomas left the game from what looked like an upper body injury and did not return, we wish him a speedy recovery.
Also in case any of you missed it the Squirrels lost down in Acadia figured I should throw that out there.
Good luck to both the Men's and Women's Tommies teams as they go into exams and have a great Holiday season!
Murph
@WyldeMurph on Twitter
UPDATE:
Unfortunately our webcast chose the beginning of the shootout to freeze up on us, so the limited video is very choppy, then we switched to audio only and a little throwback to our radio days. The call of the winner got lost a bit in the eruption from the Grant-Harvey Centre crowd (watch out for volume spike around 3:30), but for what it's worth, here's the entire shootout from tonight's first-ever Tommies' Men's Hockey win in the new building. Enjoy. And on behalf of myself and all of us on Tommies TV, happy holidays!
~ Randy Corey (@RandyCorey)
Video streaming by Ustream
No comments:
Post a Comment