Wild get their skates on again in title quest
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FOLLOWING a well-earned two week break, the ice hockey season restarts with a vengeance this weekend – with all of the Widnes teams in action – and each one having their individual targets to achieve by the end of the season.
The YKK-sponsored Widnes Wild NIHL team are top of the Laidler Division and their stated aim is to win the league title that has so tantalisingly eluded in them in recent years, having finished runners-up for the last three seasons in a row.
The Wild have never been in such a good position at this point of the season before.
They lead the league table by nine points, having picked up wins against all the other teams in the division and heading into the home straight, they have an impressive run of 14 wins on the trot which they will be keen to extend into 2019.
Widnes resume their Laidler Division title campaign this Sunday with a game away to the Blackburn ‘Hawks 2’ development team.
As the name suggests, unlike the main Blackburn Hawks Moralee Division outfit, this Blackburn team’s main aim is to develop younger players and give them experience of playing regular league games.
As such, they are not really in the chase for trophies and, indeed, have lost all of their 18 games so far this season, conceding 235 goals while scoring just 37.
Widnes comfotably beat them 22-2 in their only meeting so far this season back in October where they out-shot the Hawks by 87-14 and, while Sunday’s game might not be quite so one-sided being played on Blackburn home ice, even with the best will in the world it is hard to predict anything but a victory for the Wild.
The following Saturday – January 12 – Widnes travel to Coventry for the second time to play the NIHL Blaze team who they have beaten three times this season already.
They won 8-0 back in October in the Midlands and then saw off the Blaze 7-3 and 8-3 at home in November and last month.
Coventry are having a bit of a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ season so far, beating leading teams on some occasions and then losing to lesser sides on others.
Their most recent game – just before Christmas – saw them beat the league’s second-place team the Sheffield Sena- tors 6-5 in a highly-dramatic encounter that featured two goals in the last 60 seconds of the match.
That win did the Wild a huge favour by wiping out one of the games in hand that Sheffield had over them in the title race but Widnes will need to make sure they safely negotiate this potential banana skin in order to maintain their championship credentials.
The first home game of 2019 at Planet Ice Widnes comes just 24 hours after the trip to Coventry when the Wild play host to the aforementioned Sheffield Senators with a 5.30pm face-off time at the venue.
That should be a fascinating game to watch as, depending on how other results go between then and now, it could have a huge impact on the destination of the league championship for the 2018-19 season.