5 years ago was before i was old enough to drink, and before i had ever attended erewhon. Had i been a regular attendee of the tournament i would have no doubtedly taken the same stance as i am now. I have been a member of the gore club most of my hockey life and this is not a dig at them, i just feel they have made a bad decision.

oh oh man what a call! that hurts, but what a call! good idea, we had thought about resurecting the Ancient Britton Cup and playing in Naesby, its a bit too late in the year to be organising a tournament. if we wernt lazy buggers we would have done it by now and hosted it on the same weekend as the erewhon. we would have seen if people wanted to play their fun alcohol fuelled tournaments inside in gore or outside in naesby.

yea our reason for not attending erewhon is summed up in what vpatrol said. we apologise if it seems like we are being rude but we are just making a stand for what we believe in. where would America be if that black lady gave up her seat on the bus?

anyway, as we can spend hours debating our opinions on people getting hurt, how did we all view the refereeing?

if the same thing happened to james id laugh, if it happened to me id expect people to laugh. if its clean its funny, if its dirty its not. simple as that. the guy got up, good on him, if we had to have a stoppage of play i would have banged my stick for him when he got up and been happy that he got up, but it wouldnt have changed the fact that it was funny that he got munched.

yea, heads are up. it was a bit of a strange feeling because it felt like we were playing quite well, a lot better than the score reflected. they are a good team though you are right.

where did that photo come from?

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