I'm just back from watching the Olympic ice hockey final in the pub. If not quite as intense as watching Canada win the gold in the Maple Leaf, Covent Garden, in 2002 it was still a memorable afternoon.

For instance I don't think I'll ever be in a London pub singing "Jere Lehtinen" to the tune of Where's your papa gone? (try it!) again. I went to the Famous Three Kings in West Kensington and it was packed to the rafters with Scandis! To my surprise there were twice as many Finns as Swedes and that may explain why we watched the Finnish TV coverage. I can't say I understood any of the commentary but it was rather exciting. Finnish is meant to be a difficult language to learn but it turns out to be quite fun to listen to: a stream of vowel sounds and no breathing.

It was a great game I thought but alas the Finns couldn't take their winning streak any further and the Swedes took the gold. It's so tough in team games at the olympics. You can loose a semi-final and then try and WIN a bronze. But you can only LOOSE the silver medal while watching the winners celebrate gold. I like to think that in future they will look at that silver medal and realise how well they did, but right now it must suck!

I could tell from our trip to the games that the Finns looked really good. They are a team without massive stars, and with their 3rd choice goalie but they played fantastically well as a team: fast, hard working and disciplined. The game we saw against the Czechs was storming. And having a stadium full of fans from two hard-drinking nations guaranteed a great atmosphere. I was hoping for a Saku Koivu hat-trick and in fact he bagged a hat-trick of assists and a goal so he certainly delivered on the night.

The Canada vs Germany game wasn't brilliant but I was so excited to see the Canadian players in the flesh that it didn't really matter. Canada won 5-1 but it was a stuttering performance: unlike the Finns they weren't getting it together as a team. I thought they would find their mojo later in the tournament but they never did and lost in the quarter-finals.

Expectations in Canada were massive before the tournament and it was just like watching a typical England world cup performance with the press going from reckless confidence to blaming over-payed players, incompetent coaches and management and the state of the pitch/ice. I'm expecting something similar this summer with the football. Except this year, of course, we ARE going to win the World Cup....

Alice observed that the Canadians must be the most nationally branded people in the world. You'd seen them all around town and it was quite amazing, every man-jack (and jill) of them was head to toe maple leaf paraphenalia, in multiple layers they could deploy according to the ambient temparature.

A final memory of the hockey at Turin was the efforts of the Palasport Olympico organist who did his best to keep the fans entertained during breaks in play. He was quite fond of one particular tune and I had to laugh when I realised he was playing Talk, by Coldplay. Cold play at the ice rink. Nice