Minute silence for heartbroken Jeff

Jeff Christian

Published on 26/01/2013 08:46

SHEFFIELD Steelers are in mourning this weekend after the tragic death of the 11-year-old daughter of a former Canadian import.

Ryan Christian, daughter of forward Jeff, who played for Steelers in 2004-05, died this week from a cancer so rare it is said to effect only three other youngsters in the United States.

Steelers’ owner Tony Smith, who is organising a minute’s silence at tonight’s game against Cardiff Devils, said: “This tragedy puts everything into perspective. Hockey is only a game and family comes first in situations like this. Jeff was one of ours and our club has his family in our thoughts.”

Ryan’s mum wrote on Facebook: “After three years of fighting this terrible disease, our beautiful princess warrior is now at peace. Jeff and I were with her when she passed. She was comfortable, she did not suffer. We saw peace and calm in her face for the first time in months. Jeff and I were so lucky to be her parents.”

Meanwhile, Steelers must overcome a form dip after losing their last two games. Following the 4-2 defeat at Dundee on Thursday, coach Ryan Finnerty said: “I’ve never been so disappointed in these players. We had full control of the game at 2-1 – they didn’t touch the puck in the first 10 minutes of the third period. We just switched off for a short period and got dominated. I can’t believe the way we fell apart. We made two crazy errors and just let them back in and didn’t respond. Jeff Legue takes a stupid penalty and we can’t complete the kill.

“I’m just speechless that these guys can play that way in such a big game. I’m confident we will turn the tie around. I still have confidence in the group. They have shown for the majority of the season how good they can be, on Thursday they for just 10 minutes how bad they can be.”

n The Star understands Finnerty has been fined £500 for comments he made about referees, this week.

Sport

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Minute silence for heartbroken Jeff

Top stories

Sport