mr plod16, with myself being a referee and knowing all the rules and knowing how to referee to a high standard i can say in all seriousness that the refereeing last season was off a very poor standard, especially in the first two games in dunedin. No ref should take 10 minutes to decide on a call! thats bad to do once in a game but to do it three or for times is atrocious! then to repeat that performance the next day is beyond belief. Im not entirely sure if you were there but i can tell you that if you are a ref of any standard you would have been ashamed to be associated with such nonsense. I was.
As for the standard of reffing in the weekend up in auckland, saturday was fantastic with peter haxell wearing the red stripes, no qualms there. sunday however wasnt as good, though it is hard to follow in the footsteps of such a great referee. It wasnt bad like paul scott bad, where the game has no flow, but bad in the fact that there wasnt many penalties called, things got a bit dangerous and the ref should have called a lot more than he did, on both teams.
Being in a losing team always makes one want to blame the referees, we had no excuse on saturday but sunday really did feel like we were hard done by a couple of times. Duncan Sykes penalty for checking to the head was unfortunate as Duncan committed himself to a clean hit then the guy fell so duncan in his follow through hit his head and ended up with a 2+10. this wasnt a dangerous hit but he was penalised severely for it whilst other players from both teams made dangerous hits and ended up with nothing.
All in all a good weekend, a learning curve on saturday and proof on sunday that we are more than capable and can do it by ourselves with almost no help from foreign imports, just one on sunday, a great sign for dunedin ice hockey and a good sign for the season to come. congratulations to the swarm who played well and hard, we look foward to meeting you again

What was with all the ads plastered all over the cover shells? They get some sponsors this season or is this a league wide thing?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nzihf/coll … 569166635/

Photos of Both games now up

A Zak attack perhaps  ” title=”Cheesy” />

We’re getting swarmed with puns!

Hahaha some nice shots nziceman, James isnt one to taunt a goalie after he scored in his old age, hes actually quite a nice guy these days.. good to see you have photographic evidence of us being naughty though…

Hahahaha yeah Wick, I tend to stand around quite a bit and do sweet f.a these days.. its hard to come out of retirement back into the big league. 

Wickaman, you will be proud to know I had about 5 shots on goal all weekend, better start scoring and playing well, would be gutted if Tom Wilson the Maccas eating sensation takes my spot… all those drive through frozen cokes have given him quite a wrist shot.. or maybe Pittsburgh winning the cup did it? Or Ovechkin not getting it? Not sure.

Will be interesting to see how the weekend goes against Red Devils, sounds like they have a good team, we better skate hard and light the lamp on you Vinnie!!! Are you starting?

James eyesight is getting bad in his old age, he needs to stoop over to see if the puck is in the net. Unfortunately it has rolled out already compounding the problem. James really can’t see it.

Vince, Stefan said 5 shots, so if you let in 5 goals from that and some of our other players also shoot, you will need to score more than 7 to win.