Our first round of games are in the books this past Friday. Early tilt between Scotland and Portugal was a beauty. Shut outs for both backstops in the opening frame. Scotland scored the first 2 goals in the 2nd period. Both goals off the wood or laminate of Brideau. The Portuguese rookie Baluta scored super early in the 3rd. Scotlands Stoll and Annan made it 4-1. Portugals other rookie Don Hambly closed the gap to 2. Scots Annan gets his 2nd goal and Paciuc getting the last one. Portugals Scott McCallum scored his first every PCOHL goal. He is our Ohtami now with so many shutouts and now scoring goals, impressive. Portugal gets one more from Chantaj with 5 minutes to go but thats how this one ended as Scotland wins 6-4. Good game. Players of The Game were awarded to obviously Portugals Scott McCallum.

And for the winning Scots the very handsome Mike Paciuc.

Late game between a full squad of Slovenians and the ongoing depleted line up of the Italians needing a few fill ins for this one. Both goalies, Rispoli and Senkowski were very strong as both squads could not solve their dominance until very late in the 2nd period. Italian Chris Johnson gets them up 1-0. An Italian power play with 4 minutes to go seemed to favour the Abruzzi but Slovenia scores 2 short handed goals that just sucked the life out of them. Platt getting both of them. Slovs Vincelli closes out the 2nd with a goal putting them up top 3-1. The final frame saw Vincelli get 2 more to complete his trick for Slovenia as they finish off the Italians 5-1. Players of the Game went to Slovenias Eddy Panetta making his PCOHL debut as he has replaced the injured Di Luzio done for the season with his back issues. Good looking young man! Welcome to our league big guy!!

And for the Italians their back stop who really had an excellent effort keeping this one as close as he could.

So after one round Scotland went undefeated beating all 4 squads. Slovenia and Portugal went 2 and 2 tied for 2nd and Italy and Ireland went 1 and 3 tied for 4th place. Vincelli is lighting things up early. Don Hambly leads all rookies in scoring. And Falcone and Wilson have spent the most time with Brenda so far. Fun start.

Just some fun facts for you all. Our average age as of Nov. 1 of our 75 total members is 59.2. Yowsa thats old. Our oldest members, be nice to them on the ice, is Bruce Freeman at a young 79 years old, My goodness I can only wish to keep playing then. Next old fart is Billy Dawe at 72. 3rd oldest is goalie and our Prez Frank Rispoli at 69. At the other end, our youngest puppy is Jeff Boulton at 48, he turns 49 in November. Next puppy is Mike Russo at 49 turning the big 50 in March. And new rookie Eddy Panetta at 49, he turns the big 50 in December. A few other milestones this year. Sharp, Freehand, Davis, McKay and Kevin MacDougall all tuned 50 this calendar year. Carlisle, Young and Flumerfelt all turned 60. May and Rukavina turned 65 this year.

Flumerfelt who does our stats and weekly updates is away in Dublin and he is much better at photoshopping our POG images. I am his back up and I am away next week so there may be a one week delay in updating our stats and recaps next week as we have no back up to the back up haha.

Next up to kick off our 2nd round of our 20 game pre season schedule is October 24 at 9:15 Scotland will face off against Italy. 10:30 Ireland will do battle with Slovenia. Portugal is off. The following week is actually Halloween Night October 31. Kicking off the ghoulish night at 9:15 is Portugal and Slovenia. Late game Ireland vs Italy. Scotland gets to go extra long trick or treating that night.

See you all back on the pond and remember we are an old fart beer league!