Saturday 25th February 2023 – Moralee Division
YKK Widnes Wild 5 – Nottingham Lions 3
The YKK sponsored Widnes Wild extended their winning run to 3 games in a row with a 5-3 victory over Nottingham Lions at Planet Ice Widnes on Saturday.
Despite struggling near the bottom of the league table with just 5 wins from 26 starts this season, Nottingham put in a battling performance and the result was a highly entertaining end to end game with the outcome wide open until the very last minute.
Both teams were closely matched throughout and it took until the 14th minute of play for the first breakthrough – which saw Rhys Edwards open the scoring for Widnes.
The score remained 1-0 at the first period break and the game continued in similar vein in the second period. Nottingham equalised on 28 minutes and, two minutes later, Widnes found themselves a man short when Mikey Gilbert took exception to a refereeing decision and got himself expelled from the game for excessive remonstrating.
The Lions were unable to take advantage of the resulting powerplay and Widnes edged back into the lead again on 34 minutes with a strike from Nathan Parkes-Britton and the score remained 2-1 after two periods.
The Wild scored again on 43 minutes with a goal from Bez Hughes to put a little daylight between them and the Lions and relieve some of the tension that had been building around the rink.
This was countered 3 minutes later with a short handed strike from the visitors but a powerplay goal from Parkes-Britton restored the advantage and the score stood at 4-2 with 12 minutes left to play.
Tensions boiled over on 49 minutes and a fight saw two players from each side banished to the penalty box. In the aftermath of this, Nottingham scored a goal to narrow the deficit to just one, setting up a nail biting last 5 minutes.
With just over 2 minutes left to play, the Lions removed their netminder in favour of an extra attacker but the tactic back-fired and Nathan Parkes-Britton rounded off his hat trick with a goal in the empty net.
The 5-3 victory means that 5th place Widnes close the gap on 4th place Solihull Barons to just 1 point ahead of Sunday’s games and maintain their 9 point advantage ahead of Deeside Dragons who beat Blackburn on Saturday to move them into 6th place in the Moralee Division table.
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