Stick Tap Hockey

  Another year, another post celebrating the defending league champions. The date was March 31 st , 2019 and the venue was a hotel where Giants players and fans had gathered to celebrate the annual end of season awards, as they waited for the outcome of the Cardiff/ Coventry game to decide the league champion for the 2018/19 season, Belfast or Cardiff. When Cardiff had an 11-point lead over Belfast in the standings, you could easily have written off 2018/19 as ‘not our year’ for the league title and begin to look towards 2019/20. But, as the number of games left counted down and the gap narrowed, it was tempting to keep one eye on the Cardiff scores and hope that somehow, just somehow, we could pull it off. The Keefe era had gotten off to a successful start in 2017/18 as Belfast had taken home their first piece of silverware in four years, barring the Intu Cup of course. They had beaten Cardiff in the Challenge Cup final and then in 2019 the defending Challenge Cup champions ...