ICE HOCKEY - THE TRUTH!

A common refrain among people translated to places they weren’t born in is “You know you’ve been living in [name of place] for too long when you start to enjoy [insert name of activity you would never have dreamed off back home on the farm].” I had one of those moments on Saturday night, when I stayed up to see whether the Czech cross-country skiing machine Lukáš Bauer would win some kind of gruelling 30-kilometre multiski event in the Winter Olympics. I got really involved. The subtleties of the differences between the two types of skiing it involved rather eluded me – I tried cross-country skiing once and since then have stuck to mulled wine, log fires, Dickens novels, and watching paint dry for winter entertainment – but no way was I going to bed till it was over. Sadly, he came in something like sixth in the end, so no medals, no patriotic outpourings, just a sigh, turn off the TV, and off up the wooden hill to blanket fair.

Last night it was the turn of the ice hockey, and this time I didn’t need any persuading to postpone my bedtime. The match was between the Czech Republic and Russia. As a fan of Liverpool Football Club with many a memory (mostly happy) of matches against Everton, I thought I knew a thing or two about local rivalries, but there’s a special poignancy about games between the Czech Republic, Slovakia, or Czechoslovakia and Russia/the Soviet Union. Following the events of August 1968, and all the way up to 1989, one of the few ways in which Czechs and Slovaks could express their outrage at what had been done to them was by supporting the national team to the max when they played the Beast from the East, and the town got painted the deepest shade of red you’ve ever seen when they actually managed to beat them.

Which happened more than once. Just as in cricket or rugby, where there are only a few truly first-class countries globally (we won’t go into just which ones they may be right now – we have other business to transact), there are only a handful of countries which dine at the top table in ice hockey – basically Canada, the States, Finland, Sweden, the Czechs, Slovakia, and Russia. There are others that play, sure, but effectively they’re just there to provide cannon fodder and make up the numbers. Even since the small country called Czechoslovakia split into two in 1993, both the constituent parts have won the biggest prizes; the Slovaks were world champions in 2002, and the Czechs have been world champions no fewer than five times since 1996, and the only thing I’ve seen in 21 years here that matched the scenes of joy that followed their Olympic gold at Nagano in 1998 was the good bits from the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

But – and this is what I’ve been building up to – the Czechs and the Slovaks, for all their chest-thumping about what great hockey players they are – and trust me, gentle reader, this is one of the precious few things that either of them come over all macho about – are sitting on a well-kept and shameful secret, which not too many people know about. Which is that for a short while in the 1930s the dominant world power in hockey was…Great Britain, and we stuffed them!

Yes, it’s true. We won the Olympic gold medal and the World Championship in 1936 and, during the eighteen months or so that we bestrode the sport like a colossus, played Czechoslovakia three times, out of which we beat them twice, including a demolition job in the Medal Round of the 1936 Winter Olympics; to quote from the Manchester Storm British Ice Hockey web pages, which you can read here, “In the finals, Britain made light work of the Czechs beating them 5-0, as too did the Canadians beating them 7-0.” And then, just to make sure they didn’t have a chance to get their revenge, we sold them down the river to Uncle Adolf not long after. See – it’s all a conspiracy.

But you can’t argue with the facts. Baldly, ice hockey is just one of the innumerable things that we are better than the Czechs and Slovaks at, and the statistics prove it. And as for the Russians, those arrivistes (who, incidentally, won last night's game 4-2), we have simply never deigned to play them. Wouldn’t be quite the done thing, would it, old boy?