Our good mate Cyclone obviously has too much time on his hands, luckily for us, and has set up a SL1 fantasy league – so we thought we’d give the league a bit of a push…

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What does the Victorian SL1 men’s hockey competition have in common with the English Premier League, The NBA or even the AFL? The answer is: now all of these competitions have their very own fantasy leagues allowing fans of the competition to compete against each other on a weekly basis.Who would you rather play for your team? Dreher or Bazeley? Higgins or Hawes? Thompson or Weller? Klienschmidt or Pollard? It’s up to you, and the best thing is, it’s free! All you have top do is select your very own 11 from a pool of over 230 potential State League One players and watch the points roll on by. Of course if your team is not performing and you need to ‘shake things up a bit’, you are able to make up to 10 transfers over the duration of the season.
The Victorian State League One Fantasy League operates on the popular Dutch ‘Hoofdklasse’ scoring system below:

A Goalkeeper (GLK) will score…

10 points for each goal scored (GLS)
10 points for a clean sheet (CLS)
4 points for conceding only 1 goal (1GC)
-1 point for each goal conceded (GLC)

A Defender (DEF) will score…
6 points for each goal scored (GLS)
7 points for a clean sheet (CLS)
3 points for conceding only 1 goal (1GC)
-1 point for each goal conceded (GLC)

A Midfielder (MID) will score…
4 points for each goal scored (GLS)
1 points for a clean sheet (CLS)

A Striker (STK) will score…
3 points for each goal scored (GLS)

All players will score…

3 points for a win (WIN)
-3 points for a green card (GRN)
-5 points for a yellow card (YEL)
-10 points for a red card (RED)

Signing up is simple and takes no time at all. All you need to do is click here to go to the fantastar website and then click on the ‘join’ tab in the top right hand corner. You will need to enter the password below.

password: VICTORIASL1

While you are at it why not sign up for the State League One tipping comp at – click here!

Cheers,

Cyclone

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Keep Dribblin’

So with Adam Wallish heading off to new, and no doubt financially greener pastures I thought it may be worth looking at what he was worth – literally.

Of course this kind of information isn’t made public, but thats not going to stop me speculating wildly – not that I need to though because with some analysis it is conceivable that we can get a guesstimate of the renumeration that was being paid for the top job in hockey.

Lets take a look at the most recent Annual Report from HV, released in April last year the 2006 report sites 7.5 staff were working in the HV offices over the year (the 0.5 being a part time role). The report also reveals that employee renumeration for the year was $402,034 – which on the face of it seems like a lot of money especially if you consider it was almost 7 times as much as what was spent on development of the game across the state.

But we aren’t getting any closer to working out what you can expect to be paid if you get the keys to the SNHC (or at least a pass that gives you a discount from the pimple faced state government attendants at the front door).

So lets talk about what the other roles were and work our way up, the roles were…

Development Manager
Competition & Events
Competition & Events
Communications & State Teams
Administration Assistant
Community Officer (part time)
Accounts

Before I continue, in case anyone is wondering, the coaches and support staff for the state teams are actually accounted in a different area and so the figure for employee benefits can only be assumed to cover off the office staff as listed in the AGM report.

Now the only role I can give a firm price tag too is the Communications officer, which was advertised in October and i am reliably informed was paying around $36k. You would suggest the admin assistant would be on less than that (say $33k) and that the other roles would be on slightly more ($45k) – excepting the part time role – which lets guess at over half of the communications role, so $20k. When you add all those together you’re looking at a grand total of $269k – which we can bump up to $270k just to keep it tidy.

That leaves us to do a simple subtraction from the total employee expenses to arrive at the figure of $130k.

Now even if some of the roles did pay more than estimated there is still no doubt the CEO has been taking home over $100k and most likely an amount closer to the $125k mark.

Which leaves me pondering three questions…

1. Did we get value for money from Adam Wallish over the past few years?

2. Is financial reimbursement on this scale necessary to attract the right candidate for the job? Should it be higher?

3. Were there bonuses and incentive payments involved and if so what targets were they set for? If there werent perhaps there should be – perhaps tagets related to sponsor income being doubled (in 2006 it was just $40k)

I guess we can all make our own judgments on the answers to these questions – I’ll share my opinion on them with you in the coming weeks.

Welcome to another year of the Hockey Show and a brand new website for season 2008.

This year we are looking to make our website a more interactive and informative place following on from your feedback and our market research (or as some call it off-season pub sessions). The site will focus on bringing you the latest news and views from around the hockey world and will give you a chance to offer your view on these stories.

There will also be more streaming video available directly through this site particularly prior to the show’s initial air date on channel 31 later this year.

The forums have been given a tidy up and are ready for another onslaught of opinions and with over 5000 posts having been made over the past year we’re sure we’ll see a lot more controversy generated through the forums directly from you – the hockey loving public.

If you have some feedback on the site, the new look or some features you would like to see please either email me direct or post a comment on this story or in the forum – we would love to hear your feedback.

So without further ado, or further fluff, on behalf of the team at the Hockey Show welcome to our new site and welcome to season 08.

With summer still supposedly in the air, despite the recent evidence to the contrary, it would seem that preseason training is well and truly upon us. After deciding to turn up for the first time this year to preseason (for my beloved Altona) I trawled through my deleted emails from early January to check location and time only to discover that I would be returning once more to visit the ultra popular suburban ponce track which is the tan. Its a 3.8km circuit which started as a horse track and now has become a parade of the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, and we aren’t talking about money in the bank.

At this point in preseason (ie. the beginning of it for me) I don’t so much as run the tan as I waddle around it (I am proudly a ‘have not’), making sure I put the head down every time some 6’4″ prime specimen of a bloke seemingly glides past me at light speed wearing the male equivalent of hot pants and a boob tube. This parade of the ‘haves’ is only interrupted by the occasional stocky, 30 something bald man wearing a pair of ultra tight lycra pants with nothing else at all and doing it like its some sort of badge of honour, inevitably forcing my head to dip even further. These specimen seem to like to sprint triumphatly for 100 yards and then walk for 100 – which when mingling with my consistent waddle means I am perpetually confronted with that which all and sundry do not want to have to view… On top of that these blokes seem to believe their gaze acts as some sort of tractor beam, so that if they stare hard enough at one of the numerous scantily clad femmes around the tan they will be inexplicably drawn to them and their oversized gold chains… I wonder if it has ever worked.

It seems that the track is a popular place for the hockey community with the Essendon and Hawthorn boys also turning some laps – good to see we aren’t the only ones torturing ourselves at this stage of the season – I truly envy those who are looking forward to a two week preseason which involves a lot of ‘whiteboard’ sessions at the bar rather than three months at the tan… But for those of you heading down to take on the tan you may be interested to know that the fastest time for a lap is 10 minutes and 8 seconds and if you can get better than that not only should you ring Craig Mottram to tell him you broke his record and he can suck on some eggs, but you also might want to give the Aussie Olympic Athletics team a call to make sure they book you a seat to China later this year.