tps home opener
15 Sep 2018 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneWe went to the local Finnish league hockey team TPS's home opener last night. It's a pleasant 15 minutes' walk from home (pleasant in this weather at least: autumnal and not yet raining) to the arena. This is the second live hockey game I've seen - BIL took us to a TPS event game last year on Finland's 100th anniversary of independence. I thought the contrast to NHL games might be disappointing because the players are less skilled, but it was extremely engaging to watch from a vantage where I could see the whole ice at one time - made it easier to follow the action, too.
There was a bit of a disco light show with a high production value introductory video on the Jumbotron, showing showers of sparks and black-and-white hero shots of all the players' young hapless faces, and later some kind of hilarious hype video with smoke bombs and a girl in a skull-printed face mask attempting to give the team some urban cred that they definitely did not achieve at all. The team came onto the ice with colored lights and smoke bombs too, but still definitely significantly less fanfare than at a standard University of Alabama women's gymnastics meet (to be fair, TPS isn't historically and currently one of the top 3 teams in the league, unlike them).
There's a wedge-shaped section for cheering fans where for some reason the fold-down seats are covered in plastic tarps and they're all lounging on them and constantly doing rhythmic chanting to the actually pretty much constant (FOR THE ENTIRE MATCH) beat of one single snare drum and led in their yelling by a conductor who looks like Draco Malfoy with a TPS tattoo. (It must be a bummer for cheerleader Draco to not get to watch the action, though? Or does he have a tiny screen in front of him? Or a mirror? Or does he have to wait and watch it later on tv??) - (The fact that the snare drum never stops shows some impressive stamina and seems somehow consonant with Finnish deadpan and sisu, but since they don't have a live pep band that part is also less fanfare than at an Alabama gymnastics meet.)
Our opponents for the day were HPK from Hämeenlinna, a place I definitely need to go to check out their castle, and, as I recently discovered, a place which was the sole inland 'urban' center of Finland up until the 1600s when Tampere was founded. Their logo is circular and text-only just like ours, and in their white away jerseys they were distractingly Oilersesque.
The goalies were either both really good or both really lucky or both, and while there were a fair number of scoring chances and shots, I lost count of the number they both snatched out of the air. The match was finally decided <1 min into overtime, which isn't perhaps as triumphant as you want for your home opener, but on the other hand, it was a pretty tense match.
Actually the funniest part were the incredibly sincere and solemn own-words spoken testimonials from goalie #32 Rasmus Tirronen and right D #5 Santeri Lukka that played during the intermissions, for a local mattress store that I guess must have done some special kind of sponsorship. You really haven't lived without seeing some anxiously wrinkly-faced young Finnish dudes in polo shirts hesitantly yet in deadly earnest explaining why good mattresses are important to them.
There was a bit of a disco light show with a high production value introductory video on the Jumbotron, showing showers of sparks and black-and-white hero shots of all the players' young hapless faces, and later some kind of hilarious hype video with smoke bombs and a girl in a skull-printed face mask attempting to give the team some urban cred that they definitely did not achieve at all. The team came onto the ice with colored lights and smoke bombs too, but still definitely significantly less fanfare than at a standard University of Alabama women's gymnastics meet (to be fair, TPS isn't historically and currently one of the top 3 teams in the league, unlike them).
There's a wedge-shaped section for cheering fans where for some reason the fold-down seats are covered in plastic tarps and they're all lounging on them and constantly doing rhythmic chanting to the actually pretty much constant (FOR THE ENTIRE MATCH) beat of one single snare drum and led in their yelling by a conductor who looks like Draco Malfoy with a TPS tattoo. (It must be a bummer for cheerleader Draco to not get to watch the action, though? Or does he have a tiny screen in front of him? Or a mirror? Or does he have to wait and watch it later on tv??) - (The fact that the snare drum never stops shows some impressive stamina and seems somehow consonant with Finnish deadpan and sisu, but since they don't have a live pep band that part is also less fanfare than at an Alabama gymnastics meet.)
Our opponents for the day were HPK from Hämeenlinna, a place I definitely need to go to check out their castle, and, as I recently discovered, a place which was the sole inland 'urban' center of Finland up until the 1600s when Tampere was founded. Their logo is circular and text-only just like ours, and in their white away jerseys they were distractingly Oilersesque.
The goalies were either both really good or both really lucky or both, and while there were a fair number of scoring chances and shots, I lost count of the number they both snatched out of the air. The match was finally decided <1 min into overtime, which isn't perhaps as triumphant as you want for your home opener, but on the other hand, it was a pretty tense match.
Actually the funniest part were the incredibly sincere and solemn own-words spoken testimonials from goalie #32 Rasmus Tirronen and right D #5 Santeri Lukka that played during the intermissions, for a local mattress store that I guess must have done some special kind of sponsorship. You really haven't lived without seeing some anxiously wrinkly-faced young Finnish dudes in polo shirts hesitantly yet in deadly earnest explaining why good mattresses are important to them.
