Pre-Season Perfection

Strawbs 12 Tequila Thrashers 5

Game Report
October 25, 2007


The Strawbs would never make claims to perfection, personal, professional or otherwise. There are just too many flaws to go around, some egregious and many others actively withheld from public consumption. Moreover, the team has been burned on a regular basis as the result of that destroyer of mortals, otherwise known as hubris. If experience has taught us anything, it is that today’s victories are but wisps in the wind, the slow receding echoes of vainglory. That being said, we kicked the shit out of the Thrashers last night and they deserved it.

Inspired by Freight Train’s fabulous offensive performance of the Monday, previous, Warrin’ Peace stumbled and scrapped and scurried to put in the best game he has ever played, including the imaginary ones forever forged in his own fertile yet deluded mind. The man was on fire. Cheered on by the team’s new #1 fan, the sultry and dangerously deceiving Samara Desert, Warrin’ laid a personal beating upon the demoralized Thrashers, scoring three goals of such exquisite beauty that Venus herself blushed in her celestial aerie. “Now I know how Gretzky felt night after night” quoth the second year man. “It was like the game was slowed down and I was playing in slow motion.” Nobody had the bad taste to let Warrin’ know that the whole game WAS played in slow motion, what with the Thrashers having to play in street shoes after their manager made off with most of their hockey equipment just before game time.

Even though they may not have been shod properly for a tilt on ice, the Thrashers, manned mostly by women of Amazonian extraction, they did bring their sticks and sharpened elbows to the game. And use them they did, much to the exasperation of a team raised on Ghandi and Martin Luther King. There was more hooking on the ice last night than there ever was on a Yonge Street Saturday night. At one point during the game, there were so many broken Thrashers sticks on the ice festooned with pieces of Strawbs’ helmets, shin pads and genital protection gear that a crack team from Columbia Forests Products was called in to collect the discarded wood for use in the next four shifts at the Rutherglen strandboard plant. The opponent’s poor gamesmanship only served to rile up the perpetually riled up Dr. Thug, who, as all amateur historians know, earned his moniker in 1999 by putting through the back wall of Pete Palangio Arenas a 72 lb waif of the female persuasion who had had the temerity to suggest earlier to him that he was a wimp. Unfortunately, she learned the hard way that Dr. Thug does not take kindly to aspersions upon his manhood. Well it must have a trying day at home, because the good Doctor showed up to the match touchier that a bull in rutting season. Disgusted by the unnecessary liberty taking on ice, he promptly put an end to the one sided carnage by chopping off the punching hand of the Thrashers’ biggest offender. From then on, the game settled down into a low level grudge match complete with shoddy goaltending on both sides.

Jesse The Leak did not have his best game of the year. On four successive occasions, one of the male Thrashers beat him on the left side with the same move, a move so obvious that neophyte hockey aficionado, Samara Desert, knew the correct name for it: deke. One hopes this display was nothing more than one of those brief mind farts which occasionally afflicts the otherwise solid goaler.

To the grave concern of management, Archilles Perron still not has ramped up his game to 2004-2005 levels. When queried about his slow start to the season, Archilles lamented that he is recovering from an injury sustained this summer during a severe storm while playing the 4th hole at Osprey Links in the company of Glasgow Glamour, one of the only two good things ever to be exported from Scotland. “What injury is that?” inquired the insatiably interested Shiny Shone Brightly, the squad’s leading candidate for Rookie of The Year. “Well I thought it was a good idea at the time but I guess I was wrong. My advice to all of you is: don’t mix Viagra and iron pills. It’s deadly when lightning is around.” Ouch.

The Strawbs would like to thank all members of the standing room only crowd who cheered their team on to victory on this night: Madame Lachaise, unopinionated carrot-topped companion of the redoubtable Vice Marshall, ponderous Pamdaemonia, president of the Global Dithering Club, Samara Desert, nurse, bonne vivante and quiet troublemaker, and Orillia Denis The Dealer, hockey and drinking mentor to Warrin’ Peace. Without your support, our team’s liquid refreshment bill at the Terminal Tavren would not be anywhere near record levels.

7 Stellas, 14 Guinnnesses, 6 Keith’s Red, 4 Bud Light, a blueberry tea (what the …?) and some errant wood chips from the battering clubs of untamed Amazons were consumed.