As close to the game

I bought my ticket to the AIHL Grand Final watch party reasonably confident the Sydney Ice Dogs would not be playing in it.

At the time their finals chances looked remote, but they recovered enough to qualify and then beat Perth on Friday. For about a day, the neutral ticket I had bought suddenly came with the possibility that I might be watching my own team in the grand final.

Newcastle ended that on Saturday with a 10-1 win. I was at another sporting event at the time, following updates on my phone, and there was not much positive to take from watching the score get progressively worse.

So on Sunday I went to Hoyts at Chatswood to watch Newcastle North Stars play Canberra Brave in Melbourne.

The idea was simple enough. The grand final had sold out, Melbourne was a long way away, and the AIHL had arranged for the game to be shown live at selected Hoyts cinemas. Chatswood looked close to full. There were Ice Dogs jerseys scattered around the room, some Newcastle colours and groups of people who had clearly come together.

I had wondered whether the crowd might be more conversational, but most people stayed within their own groups. That did not make the room feel disconnected. Once the game started, everyone had the same thing to react to.

A cinema also comes with habits that are almost the opposite of a sporting crowd. Normally you sit quietly in the dark and try not to disturb anyone around you. Here, talking was fine. Cheering was expected. People clapped, groaned, called things out and occasionally offered fairly direct opinions about decisions.

The strangeness disappeared quickly.

The large screen and cinema sound obviously gave the game more scale than I would have had watching at home, but the stream also gave me things I would not necessarily have seen from a seat at the rink. Cameras moved through the Melbourne crowd and picked out supporters in team colours. There were interviews with coaches during the breaks, commentary around the game and cameras on the benches catching reactions that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Those things became part of the Chatswood event as well. People applauded some of the supporters shown on screen. A few recognisable faces in the Melbourne crowd got cheers. At one point some Perth players appeared and received a reaction from what sounded like at least a few Perth supporters in our cinema.

There were effectively two crowds involved. Melbourne supplied the one we could see and hear through the broadcast. Chatswood supplied another around me.

I had briefly thought I might support Newcastle. They had knocked the Ice Dogs out, so if they won I could at least claim we had been eliminated by the eventual champions. Newcastle is also closer to Taree, where I grew up, than Canberra is.

It made sense in theory. It never became anything more than that.

Once the game started I found myself reacting to both teams. A good chance was a good chance. A big save was a big save. Without the Ice Dogs involved, I apparently did not need to manufacture an allegiance.

The game itself gave the room plenty to react to. Newcastle went two goals ahead, Canberra pulled one back, and by the third period it was 2-1. Canberra kept applying pressure while Newcastle kept finding ways to survive it. There were close calls, penalties and enough physical attention around the Newcastle goal to keep things tense.

Midway through the third period, the cinema screen went blank.

For a while there was no hockey and no sound. Eventually some kind of screensaver appeared where the grand final had been.

Then the phones appeared.

Within perhaps thirty seconds there were small screens glowing throughout the cinema. The couple beside me had the game running. So did people further along the row. I could see more streams several rows in front and could hear others behind me.

There must have been something approaching twenty phones showing the same hockey game.

For a few minutes, the enormous cinema screen was useless and the grand final continued on tiny screens scattered through the darkness.

The speed of it was what struck me. People had come to Hoyts to watch the game on a huge screen, but many clearly had another way of watching it. When the shared screen disappeared, they simply switched to their own.

They could see the hockey either way.

What they had chosen was to see it here.

The cinema feed returned after a few minutes and the phones disappeared almost as quickly as they had appeared. Everyone went back to the large screen.

Canberra continued to push for an equaliser, Newcastle held them out, and the game finished 2-1. People applauded, and while some left immediately, plenty stayed for the presentation and celebrations. I stayed through much of it before eventually heading out.

Watching from Chatswood was not the same as being inside the rink in Melbourne. I could not choose where to look, hear whatever happened beside me or feel the cold coming off the ice.

But the difference was not entirely one-way. The broadcast had shown me faces in the Melbourne crowd, interviews, reactions on the benches and other things I might easily have missed from a seat in the rink. The cinema gave those things scale, while the people around me supplied much of what watching the same stream at home would have been missing.

For a few minutes, when the big screen failed, everyone retreated to their own little version of the game.

Then the picture came back, the phones went away, and we watched it together.