
Windsor 4, Brampton 1. My Spitfires are one game closer to (and only one win away from) their second OHL Championship. After suffering a setback on Monday in game 3 at the hands of a determined Brampton club, the Spits stormed out of the gate in the first last night and attacked the Brampton goal (occupied by Thomas McCollum) repeatedly and in waves. The sold-out Powerade Centre in Brampton was bursting at the seams with 4,861 junior hockey fans (including, I am happy to note, a very noticeable and very vocal contingent of Spitfire supporters), but the Battalion players seemed unable to draw sufficient energy from their assembled well-wishers to assist them in mounting an effective counter-attack at the outset of the game. The Spitfires carried by far the vast majority of the play in the first frame and outshot the home side by a margin of 12-7; in fact, with only the occasional generally fleeting Brampton foray into Windsor territory, to my mind that shot count is somewhat misleading as it fails to reflect the territorial advantage enjoyed by the Sptifires throughout the period. I suspect that many of those 7 Brampton shots were accumulated during the power-play they had when Windsor’s Richard Greenop was called for high-sticking well behind the play. At times during the first, the Windsorites seemed to cycle the puck low in the Brampton zone almost at will. To the credit of the Brampton defenders, they prevented with some frequency the prolonged Windsor cycling from developing into truly high quality scoring opportunities. In fact, for much of the period it seemed as though the Battalion would manage to survive the sustained offensive pressure in their zone; of greater concern for Brampton coach Stan Butler, no doubt, would have been Windsor’s success in the transition game. I counted at least a half-dozen odd-man rushes generated by Brampton turnovers either at, or just over the Windsor blueline – including one early four-on-two attack that must have had Butler reaching for the Alka Seltzer.