Pilots steer clear of rain and loss

As the Sharks regional team seldom lose game two, this one was plain unlucky.
Heavy rain forced Malmö back home.
Unfortunately, they won the first one.
“We had a complete and total collapse,” Jason Norderum says.

The Sharks (4-7) offense came out and played in the rain on Saturday, feasting off Malmö Pilots (4-3) starter Eric Browne. An early 4-0 lead and the rain felt more like champagne pouring on the fins of the regional players.

That feeling would not last.

Sharks starter Mikael Lindquist battled through the whole game and should have gotten away with his second win of the season but this was not his or Hajarnas day.

“Mikael pitched a great game, that was really nice to see”, Jason Norderum, Advisor to the GM and Special Assistant to the Travel Coordinator says.

The Pilots did score some runs off of Lindquist but the Sharks bit back every time.

“On offense, we jumped on top early and responded every time they scored on us. We were really cruising until the wheels came off”, Norderum says.

You wouldn’t really imagine Sharks being that familiar with wheels and so the falling off might have been inevitable. In the top of the seventh inning with the Sharks holding a one run lead, they fell. And they fell hard.

Jason Norderum, who was on the verge off dedicating the win to his mother Marian, had this to say about the breakdown:

“We had a complete and total collapse in the last inning of the ball game and that cost us the win”, Norderum says.

The Pilots scored three runs in that disastrous top of the seventh, capitalizing mainly on sloppy Sharks defense.

“We went down as a team. We weren’t aggressive enough and didn’t want the ball. We didn’t want to win the ball game, we just hoped we would”, Norderum says.

If Sharks aren’t good with wheels, Pilots aren’t known to be good with bad weather. There was some debate about the playing conditions but eventually the second game was called off. Rumor has it that the make up game will be played in September.