The Whitley Warriors ground out another hard-earned victory against the Sheffield Spartans last night to move within a single point of claiming a play-off berth.
Victory over the already relegated Sheffield Senators next weekend will move the Warriors to 43 points for the season and mean the Telford Tigers can no longer catch them. Only the Solihull Barons and Solway Sharks can mathematically catch the North-east side with just six points required from the remaining six games to claim second spot in the league.
Whitley found it difficult to break down a resolute Spartans side in the opening period with some strange calls made on both sides, preventing any kind of free-flowing hockey. Spartan’s forward Elliott Knell was ejected from the game with a misconduct penalty, just 5:30 into the clash.
The Spartans grabbed the lead, somewhat against the run of play at 32:31 when former Blackburn hawks defenseman Chris Wilcox fed David Pyatt to fire in a huge slap shot from the blue-line.
Whitley looked to respond immediately and went close a couple of times before eventually tying the game at 34:07. Some good work from Shaun Kippin around the crease, helped to set up Dean Holland on the powerplay.
Whitley probably should have added to their lead before the second intermission, but they were unable to find a way past Spartans goalie Andrew Bagshaw.
With seven regular players missing for the Warriors [Queenan, Barnes, Payette, Stamp, Cooper, Smedley and Johnson not to mention long-term injury victims Stu Tomlinson and Alex Lawson] it meant there were some unusual lines put out onto the ice. Indeed Martin Crammond, a regular on the third forward line was forced to ice as a defenseman with so many blue-liners unavailable for this encounter.
With 48:03 of the game elapsed, Adam Reynolds set up Ben Richards for what would prove to be the game winner.
The game would end in controversy however when with 2:51 remaining referee Paul Staniforth made the decision to end the game prematurely. Douglas Jordan was called for a cross-check on Dean Holland, with the Whitley power forward spilling blood on the ice. With no ice maintenance crew available to clean up the blood, Staniforth who was in a hurry to end the game so he could move next door to act as linesman in the Sutton Sting/Blackburn Hawks game, signalled to the players to resume the action.
The blood was clearly visible, even from the commentary box and was in the face-off circle they were about to use to re-start proceedings. Sheffield quite rightly objected to continue playing in those circumstances, which earnt them nothing but further misconduct penalties.
Stephen Weeks, was ejected from the game and at this stage the Warriors would have had a 5-on-3 powerplay for the next two minutes. Had the Spartans been able to kill that penalty off they would have been left with 51 seconds to pull their goalie and attempt to tie the game themselves.
In the end though Staniforth decided not to allow Sheffield to continue the game in what became farcical scenes. It was not only a joke for what has been a very good league to watch this season but also extremely harsh on a Spartans side who had played well and deserved to see out the closing 171 seconds.
All that meant Whitley took the two points home with them and edged that much closer to confirming their return to iceSheffield in April for the playoff weekend.
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