Coming off a long layover with 2 consecutive bye weekends caught up with the Thunder in the opening match on Saturday night. Despite starting the game relatively strong, the Thunder showed rust early on. The Admirals on the other hand came ready to play despite low numbers due to injuries and suspensions.
The Thunder enjoyed more shots almost doubling the figure for the Admirals. Although the Admirals kept most of the Thunders shots to the outside while the shots the Admirals did get off were of higher quality.
One of the biggest differences on the night proved to Finnish import Jouni Kivela scoring 6 of the Admirals 8 goals with 3 of them being unassisted.
The Admirals opened the scoring with a nice tip by Mike Dobbs which deftly found its way to the top of the net on a powerplay, The Thunder answered back almost immediately through Quentin Pepy to tie the scores up. The tit for tat scoring continued with Kivela scoring 2 minutes later to bring the score to 2-1 Admirals. This is how the scores would stay going into the break.
The Thunder came out strong at the start of the second to tie the score up again through a goal by Damien Watson. This just served to awaken the Admirals with Kivela scoring 2 unanswered goals in the 2nd period, to end it 4-2. The end of the second saw an interesting coaching call from the Admirals with 0.3 seconds left on the clock the Admirals pulled there goalie for an extra attacker. An innovative move but with so little time left on the clock it did not come to much.
The Thunder feeling flat tried to change things up by changing goalies by putting Aaron Bryant in the net. Unfortunately this did stop the Kivela show as he scored another 3 goals. Parry was sent back in to finish the night off however the other Finnish imports did not want to be outdone with Joonis Markko stepping up to score one more goal for the Admirals with 2 minutes remaining. Finishing strongly, the final score was 8-2 to the Admirals