Basingstoke UK: The Bison surrendered their perfect home record for this season as they were beaten by the Peterborough Phantoms 3-2.
The Herd had won their previous 13 games on home ice which was a club record for the EPL and within shooting range of the franchise’s best of 18 in their championship season of 1992/93 when the team completed a clean sweep of wins in Basingstoke.
The Bison for the third week running made a change to their import line-up as due to an injury to leading goal scorer Tomas Karpov, Canadian Joe Rand returned to line-up and slotted into his place in the line between Alan Lack and Grant Rounding.
Once again Finnish-born goalie Jon Baston played in place of the injured Tomas Hiadlovsky.
He was looking to continue his excellent form on his opening weekend with the team, when he gave up just one goal from 59 shots, which included a shut-out on his debut against Telford.
The Herd made the perfect start to the game against their title rivals Peterborough, as they took the lead after 70 seconds, thanks to a powerplay strike from Rene Jarolin.
However, after dominating early on a number of powerplays saw the momentum shift and Martins Susters, scorer of a hat-trick against the Buffalo on his last visit to Basingstoke, slotted home to tie things at the first buzzer.
By the first break, an injury to Darius Pliskauskas saw Peterborough forced to change their lines and they looked very disjointed for the whole of the second session.
The Bison took control of the game and Peterborough’s man of the match Janis Auzins kept his side in the game as he made 22 saves in the session, as his side only trailed 2-1 at the end of the second session.
Bison man of the match Alan Lack was the scorer as he tipped home a Kurt Reynolds’ blue line shot.
Peterborough then scored twice in the last 10 minutes from Ales Padelek and James Ferrara, as they won the game and took top spot away from the Bison.
“I could not fault the effort of the players, but it was penalties which cost us and we have to learn from this,” said Bison head coach Doug Sheppard.
The Herd are on the road this weekend as their is an ice show at their home venue.
The Bison first trip to Yorkshire to take on the Sheffield Steeldogs on Saturday, before a shorter trip to Bracknell.
Basingstoke won on their trip to Sheffield, but the Steeldogs go into the game on the back of a five game winning streak.
The visitors will wait on the fitness of Karpov and Hiadlovsky, but Rand and Baston are both available for this weekend.
On Sunday, the Bison will hope to erase from the memory one of their worst performance of the season which saw them lose 4-1 at the Hive earlier this season.
Being a local derby game anything can happen and the Bees produced a superb comeback last weekend as they were 8-1 down in Swindon with 10 minutes to go only to tie the match and send it into overtime which they eventually lost.
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