Game one of Better Red, Than Dead weekend kicked off Friday evening with
the Harvard Crimson hosting the Cornell Big Red.  The Bright Hockey Centre
event was won 2-4 by Cornell.  There was a lot of hustle and bustle but an
extremely minute amount of attractive ice hockey.

Check - check - check was all the rage in the first.  Big Red like to gang
check, and tend to leave huge areas of the ice open for their opponents.
Cornell notched the opening tally when junior defender Brooke Bestwick's
(Briana Jentner) low point shot through a screen found nothing but net.
Eventually HU would even the score at one, during a power play, off a pile
up in the Big Red crease.

The tiresome second found Cornell showing tons of running around, which
didn't add up to much.  The Big Red fans would claim that the main zebra
bought into HU's diving act way too much, and they would be absolutely
right.  Nevertheless, Cornell went up 1-2 when a somewhat slow whistle
allowed Lindsay Murao to dig the puck out from under the HU goalie and
stuffed it home.

At the start of the final period, Big Red went up by two when super sophy
Anita Khar (Eva Nahorniak) did her thing at full tilt at both ends of the
ice, before burying her try thru the five-hole.  It was a brilliant
individual effort and perhaps the killer goal?  At that point the match
opened up, and if it wasn't for the miserable Cornell passing, they would
have put the game away.  Instead, HU pulled one back to make it 2-3, after
Big Red had let numerous chances go wanting.  But Cornell was in classic
close-it-out mode and left few lanes open.  In the dying seconds, Big Red's
Jentner collected an empty-net goal to seal victory.

Cornell gets so stuck in their patterns that they are unable to break out
of it and react to the situations at hand.  The result is their movement
off the puck is often horrendous.  What won this game for Cornell was their
superior determination.  Bestwick epitomizes the Big Red spirit.  She is a
fireball.  Bestwick also laid on some marvelous longball feeds.  The woman
of the match was easily Khar.  She wowed the audience with rapid,
intelligent skating.  Her exceptional back-checking and crunching rushes
were fun to watch.  Khar's movement was ripping!  Overall, as my notebook
laments: "Do something with it."





=====
____________________
                    \
    good shooting
    rhun
\____________________

Women's College Ice Hockey from rhun:  http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~cwinters

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Great stuff seeking new owners in Yahoo! Auctions!
http://auctions.yahoo.com