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 Season One Championship winning team
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John Lawless
(Coach Cardiff Devils) was approached at the Premier League Play Off Finals
in March 1995 to lead the then unnamed team. Soon he would be joined by player/assistant
coach Daryl Lipsey and the team would be called "The Manchester Storm"
Storm's
first competitive game was in the 1995 Benson and Hedges cup. Their opponents were the
Telford Tigers, the game was played in Telford on August 26th 1995, and the
Storm lost by 6-4.
(The very first game was Storm vs Sheffield at a pre season
tournament - Fire
on Ice has the whole story)
It was the
return game against Telford that saw the Storm make their home debut at the
Nynex Arena. 10, 034 people watched the teams battle it out on September
15th, saw twelve goals and saw the hooter blow with the final scoreline at 6-6.
In this first competition Storm had struggled to overcome not only the problems
of starting a new team from scratch ... but also the fact that two of their
"import" players had not been available.
Storm's regular season started on October 1st with a 6-2 win over the Dumfries
Vikings in British League Division One. The Storm hardly looked back
after that, losing only three more games in the rest of the season. Crowd
numbers grew and grew ... culminating in a massive crowd of 16, 280 on February
21st 1996 to see the Storm beat the Blackburn Hawks 11-3. The Storm topped
the League with a massive 99 points from 52 games. Goals for 539 ... goals
against just 185.
Click here to see highlights of the Storm vs Hawks game
The final League table and first season player list / players stats are available here.
In
the end of season promotion play offs Storm topped their group to win a place
in the Premier League. It was an impressive start to a new franchise.
(Liam Sluyter's book "Seasons to be Cheerful" tells
the full story of Storm's first season. See Amazon link left)
The
original logo ...
