Joint East Hockey League Report to ERHA AGM 3 July 2008

Most of you won’t remember the days when league tables came out two or three times a season and were posted to the clubs 2^nd class. These days, the top 5 men’s leagues are usually available by 6pm Saturday night, and most results are on the website within 24 hours, depending on when the league managers get all the results in. The advance in communications since I started on the committee is huge. With the deadline for entry into the Men’s league only 3 weeks ago, the fixtures should be available on the website later this week. The Women’s League is by invitation

This year, Jim Morris retired from being a league manager due to the increasing pressures of his job. Jim thought he had been doing the job for 3 or 4 years, and it came as something of a shock to him when I mentioned that he has completed TEN years as a League Secretary/Manager. It just goes to show that time flashes by when you’re enjoying yourself. We already have two volunteers to take over some of the now available leagues. Jim was given a tankard and an East tie in recognition of his work

With the rug pulled from under us by England Hockey and the retiring East President with respect to young people playing adult league hockey, I took the decision NOT to attend East Region meetings for the 1^st half of the season as a protest – but I have the feeling that nobody even noticed!!

Yellow / Red cards – During this last season we had 1031 Yellow cards and 47 Red ones. This may sound like a lot of yellow, and is, but bearing in mind that a third of those are in the Men’s Premier league where the competition is very fierce, it is less than one in every 4 games played and is over 100 fewer than last year. The increase in suspensions for multiple cards brought in for last season may have had an effect. As I understand it we are still the only region to have the sanction of missing games for multiple yellow cards, and I for one am glad to be ahead of the other regions in this regard. A worrying aspect of this though is that there are twice as many RED cards as one usually expects in a season, but this is administered by England Hockey and we do not have much input.

This year more clubs than EVER before failed to come to collect their cups, even clubs who can walk to the venue, and each is fined £100. It is most embarrassing when a club’s name is announced, everybody is clapping, the East President is holding a cup to give out and nobody appears! Combine this with the £50 fine for late return of cups by 5 clubs and we have a large pot of fines this year. For a long time, our only sponsorship was by the teams that couldn’t be bothered to avoid fines to the tune of up to £2400 in the best/worst year, which helps to keep the entry fees down.

We are very pleased to say that the league is now officially sponsored for a 3 year period by NE14Hockey a company formed by Simon, the son of ex-League Chairman – Steve Buckley.

After years of trying, we now have a rule brought in that all umpires are nominated by clubs on the East website, that they are all Level 1 and that they should be fully paid up members of their Associations.

We have been trying to get all games umpired by Level 1 since Level 1 first came in in the early 90’s. This has been very successful with very few clubs not fully complying.

When we finally got Herts & Beds to realise that we would support them if they threatened sanctions for clubs not supplying umpires to the pool the HBHUA pool suddenly grew from 9 to 26, and the appointments secretary wondered how he’s going to keep all his umpires happy. This has meant a bit of transferring of umpires to “help out” the non-compliant clubs, but hopefully more umpires will come forward.

Trevor Williams along with Robert Southgate and Janet Goody the two Premier League managers have spent a huge amount of time on the actions of the 2^nd teams of some of our National League clubs. It has taken hours of poring over National League Team sheets, comparing them with East team sheets and looking for reasons why someone should play a complete game in each league on certain weekends. Worse is when the EHL has a break for the indoor tournaments. Teams lost any game in which they were found to have supplemented their team from above by 3-0 which caused two relegations for teams who thought they were safe, and one team failed to get promoted. We are aware that the penalties imposed touch the tip of an iceberg, but without the benefit of a crystal ball it is very difficult without the vigilance of the clubs they play against to bring to book any club who misuses the “playing down” rule at ANY level. One second team clearly wanting to do legally what they have been doing illegally in the East League has decided to leave and join one of the less stringent leagues. The Chairman of the London League says if you have fewer rules, there are fewer to break! They of course only have 2^nd teams and below, and have a lot of EHL clubs in their ranks, so it just means the clubs are doing it to each other rather than honest 1^st teams in clubs who don’t have that facility.

When Trevor became Secretary, he worked hard to cut down the number and complexity of the rules and put them in logical sequence. Clubs seem to have conspired to make us make more rules to stop some activity or other, and these activities become more prevalent near the end of the season.

There was a long discussion at the League AGM - mainly by the clubs who had been sanctioned ie “found out”, but it was good to see other clubs’ 1^st teams agreeing with the League Committee about the unfair use of top players

As with all possible loopholes and chances to misinterpret rules, the one about “starred players” was modified so that a copy of the EHL team sheet will be sent by the club to the league manager each week, and the starting 11 plus 1 other may NOT play in the East in the same week. This means that EHL clubs cannot “forget” to change the starred list, or put on it people who are very unlikely to be regular 1^st XI players – both common practices in the past. During the indoor break, the previous 2 weeks team sheets will be considered.

The League AGM was surprisingly well attended, and had some lively discussions. It lasted 3 times longer than usual because of that. All the rule changes the league wanted were overwhelmingly agreed with only one person abstaining.