SWINDON, UK – Another pretty quiet week, so I thought I would go on about my recent holiday instead. No? Perhaps it would be best because even without naming names and places for anyone who reads a daily tabloid the embarrassment would be difficult to disguise, especially involving a man of the cloth.
So, enough of me, and onto what little news there was. The Bees returned another pair with the re-signing of Brits Ben Johnson in defence and Matt Foord to the forward line.
Johnson hasn’t strayed far from Bracknell for the last four years with spells playing for the ENL Hornets, while Foord, who first played for the Bees in 2005, has wandered slightly further afield including a couple of seasons in Swindon with the Wildcats.
In Guildford the Flames re-signed Milos Melicherik for what will be his tenth season with the club. The Slovakian forward first arrived in Guildford in 2003 from playing on the Continent and has clocked up some respectable figures ever since at a fairly consistent fraction under two points per game on average.
Meanwhile, 20-year-old D-man Ross Green re-signed for the Lightning for what will be a seventh season in Milton Keynes. Green kicked off his career with the Storm as a GB Under-19 player in 2006 graduating to the senior side the following season. Since then the Lightning, Storm and Thunder have all had their share of him, which sounds like quite a tempestuous career, and so too has the GBU-20 side.
The Tigers added 22-year-old D-man Jaroslav Kruzik from playing most recently in Slovakia with HK Nitra. This is the first time the Czech has played in Britain but he showed a lot of promise in the Ontario Hockey League a couple of seasons back.
The show-stealers this week, however, were the Steeldogs with three names added to their squad. D-man Lewis Bell returned for a third time, and while not exactly born and bred in Sheffield has certainly spent enough years there with the Scorpions, Spartans, Steelhawks and Scimitars to know his way around without a guide dog.
Forward Craig Elliott, who joined the Steeldogs in 2010 after several years in the ENL in Hull but then lost part of last season through injury, also returned.
Then, well, cover me in sugar and call me a doughnut, but like last week, another ‘mystery’ solved as the long awaited Derek Campbell, who left the Elite League’s Hull Stingrays a couple of weeks ago, finally appeared in the Sheffield arrivals lounge.
Campbell, who first played in British hockey back in 2006 with the Phoenix when they were in the Elite League, has had what you might call an intriguing career since having amassed in those seven years an impressive 1,408 penalty minutes or 4.34 per game on average. In the ten years prior to that in North America he accrued an average of 2.37 minutes per game. In other words, something changed quite radically on his coming to play in Britain with a jump of around double the penalties. Now whether that is a difference in how the rules are enforced here, which on the face of it doesn’t sound likely because his peak was actually last season which suggests either he hasn’t adapted to any difference for whatever reason, or, alternatively, he is a more physical player, is anyone’s guess.
Either way, with 264 penalty minutes last time out he makes even his new boss Andre Payette, who led the EPL last season with 216 penalty minutes, look like a choir boy. Well, maybe not quite a choir boy. Did I really say that? Anyway, with almost 500 points between them that is almost as much as the Tigers or Phoenix or Phantoms total team tally for penalty minutes, and if you add Steeldogs’ other top ten penalty-taker Pavel Gomeniuk, then it surpasses those totals by a mile.
Now while it would be wrong to pre-judge it will be fascinating to compare Campbell under Payette with Andrew Sharp at the Flames last season who was subdued by his standards under the reign of Paul Dixon. Payette, of course, has a different philosophy and with the Steeldogs ruling the penalty chart last season, cast the runes and they fall in a pattern which suggests more of the same – big time!
But I don’t need a bag of magic stones to tell me that was all the news for the week, so it is time to go back to see if the vicar has come out of hiding yet.
For more EPL facts and figures, stats news and more take a look at www.iceman-epl.com Contact Bill.Collins@prohockeynews.com
