Off to see the DEL (German Hockey league)

Last Christmas, I received a nice gift of hockey tickets. The game was in March and was between Augsburg and Dusseldorf.  The original intention was to go with Ryan, however professional schedule conflicts ended up taking him out of the country on game day and I invited Liam the superfan to join me.  Liam of course was pretty excited to go and see a real live game.  His only other exposure to live hockey had been watching me play in Stuttgart once and his comment there was that I “fall down a lot.”  Hopefully seeing professionals play would give him a bit better experience.

We left the car at Claudia’s parent place and took the subway over to the arena.  I have learned my lesson when it comes to sporting events and will never ever drive to one again when there is any public transit option…  On the train Liam was grinning ear to ear the whole way there.  He asked every other passenger if they were also going to see hockey.  He had lost his first tooth a couple of days before the game and I thought it gave him a nice hockey look.



Liam was all hockeyed up, with a Peter Puck hat and Toronto Maple leafs sweater.   As you can see, there is a pretty good sized crowd, the game was sold out and I think the capacity was around 12,000 seats.



Those of you who know me know that I have never been much of a Leafs fan.  My team growing up was the Montreal Canadiens thanks to my hockey-worship of Patrick Roy.  Liam’s fandom comes from the STIGA hockey game that he received last Christmas.  A fantastic game we play pretty often which features Toronto versus Detroit.  Liam latched on to Toronto in this game and has been a Toronto fan ever since.  At the game I bought him a Panther’s scarf to add to his hockey fan-suit.



Before the game started, the Augsburg players were all announced and skated out through a giant inflatable black panther head (Augsburg Panthers.) This bit of theatre was already pretty exciting for Liam and the incredibly loud crowd was also getting him worked up.  It is quite a different feel to an NHL crowd, and I thought it was really a lot more like a soccer crowd.  Singning, chanting, banging drums all at top volume and I think about 80% of the crowd were wearing team jerseys.  A lot of spirit for sure.



We enjoyed quite good seats, just off the red line and 2/3 of the way up the bleachers, giving a good view of the ice.  The arena was pretty good, but under renovation with some construction making the entrance a little chaotic.  Another strange feature of the arena is that there are only three walls.  If you look past Liam the superfan here, you can see that trees and neighbouring buildings are clearly visible.  It was a chilly breezy day, so there was a bit of wind coming in from that side keeping us rather cool.





Another major difference to a North American sporting event was the concession stands.  For the entire venue, there were two small windows selling food and drink.  One of them was the beer and warm food window, with things like sausages (of course) fries, schnitzel in bread and such.  The other window served sweet things and the ubiquitous German coffee and cake.  This was one of the parts of the arena under construction and it was a big booth of particle board containing one granny with a cash box.  You can see the selection of cake on paper plates to choose from.  This was one of the most bizarre things at the game for me, I never associated cake with hockey, but Germans love coffee and cake no matter what the event.  I can not picture this set up at the Air Canada centre for the Leafs though…



Here are the hockey men enjoying the game…


It was a pretty exciting game, Augsburg trailed for the 2nd and 3rd periods but managed to tie it in the closing seconds.  The brief overtime solved nothing and the game went to penalty shots.  Sadly Augsburg was not able to do much in this department and Dusseldorf went on to win 4-3 on penaltys.  Here is a video I shot of the game winning penalty….