Hull Stingrays 3 Newcastle Vipers 2

Mar 11 2010 by Peter Adams

BEATEN now twice in five days by bottom-of-the-table Hull, Newcastle Vipers’ battle to finish the league season in seventh place intensifiied with last night’s defeat.

The loss, the out-of-form Vipers’ third in a row, means the points advantage they have over the Stingrays is cut to five with both having just four league games left to play, including one against each other.

Coach Rob Wilson had demanded a response following Saturday night’s embarrassing 7-1 home defeat against the Stingrays and Sunday’s 7-4 road loss to the Cardiff Devils. However, by the time the game was 11 minutes old, a damaging third successive defeat looked likely.

Three minutes after face-off, Hull took the lead, Curtis Huppe and Lee Mitchell combining to set up defenceman George Halkidis for the score.

On 11 minutes the puck was flying past Vipers’ netminder Michel Robinson again, this time propelled by Stingrays top points scorer Konstantin Kalmikov.

With Jason Silverthorn sitting out an interference penalty, the Vipers got on the scoresheet with 43 seconds of the period remaining. Straight from the face-off that began the second period the Stingrays attacked successfully, Silverthorn making up for the penalty call by slotting home his 18th goal of the season.