LONDON, UK – Just two years after editing his 41st and final Ice Hockey Annual, renowned journalist Stewart Roberts is enjoying retirement as he looks forward to Great Britain’s return to the top table of World hockey and casts his eye across the domestic game.
The Bible of British Hockey
For many UK hockey fans The Ice Hockey Annual was a much treasured part of the fabric of the game in this country, right back to its first edition printed 1976. The A5 book that often came just in time to be the perfect Christmas present, acted as a reliable source of truth pre and post internet and is still an invaluable almanac of stats, reports and news to followers of the sport today.
Its creator’s resilience and love of the game kept the Annual show on the road for 41 years, outlasting players, owners, governing bodies and everyone else besides, aside of course from a masochistic hard-core of veteran volunteers and fans willing to put up with the often circus like antics off the ice, to enjoy the raw emotion of the wonderful sport on it.
In 2017 Roberts announced the ‘Bible of British Hockey’ would be no more, thus prompting a sombre response from those that had come to love the pages that documented their teams and leagues like nothing else. It was a reaction understood but not shared by an editor now enjoying retirement to the full.
“If I shed any tears, it was just before I gave up, as the strain of producing it was giving me sleepless nights and almost daily headaches” admits Roberts, when asked how it felt to finally close the book.
“The relief of not having to produce 180-odd pages of photos, stats and text every year is, frankly, quite marvellous. Though I still follow the sport closely – I’m a big Guildford Flames fan now – it’s wonderful not to have to worry about making notes of games and of every scrap of news.
“My free time is spent playing snooker, socialising with non-hockey friends, walking round London, going to shows in the West End and travelling abroad as much as possible. Only recently, I had a fortnight on the west coast of the USA, when as well as such natural wonders as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite National Park and San Francisco Bay, I saw the Golden Knights’ arena in Las Vegas.
Roberts (right) welcomes Stevie Lyle to the Hall of Fame
“I’m still a big NHL fan and as the New York Rangers are on a bit of a downer right now, the Knights are my new NHL faves. Thanks to good old Premier Sports, I get to watch a fair bit of the Show on TV, and isn’t it great that so many Elite League teams have a streaming service as well as being on Freesports.
“Then there’s Europe’s Champions League and GB in the World Championships. Sorry, the question was about my ‘free time’, wasn’t it? How did I find time to produce a yearbook would be a better one?”
Most British hockey fans have at least one Ice Hockey Annual, but many are unavailable and have become real collectors items. Like any editor, Roberts can pick out the most notable from the archives, based on his own personal experiences – both good and bad, of producing them.
“The Annual I’m most proud of is the 1996-97 one, which I did the year after I took early retirement from my insurance job” he explains.
“This is the edition that has a complete register of all the players – mostly Brits back then – who staffed the old Heineken League teams, compiled by my friend Gordon Wade, the league’s statistician. A real collectors’ item.”
“The book that gave me the most trouble was the 1981-82 edition, another collector’s item. During the 1981-82 campaign, apart from the day job, I was also heavily involved in organising the sport, though I use the word ‘organising’ very loosely.
“This was the Season of a Hundred Leagues – English National, Scottish National, Northern League, English League South, English League North, plus several cups – Icy Smith, Spring, Ben Truman (the first sponsored competition).
“The Annual was six months late coming out in April 1982 and then it was wrongly titled 1980-81. Any readers who have a copy of this lying around, leave it to your grand-children, who knows what it might be worth in the future.”
A keen supporter of the national team and long-time advocate of more commitment to it over the last four decades, it’s not surprising that Great Britain’s return to pool A to face Canada, USA, Finland, Germany, hosts Slovakia, Denmark and France has whet the appetite.
The GB team fly out to Kosice in May, with hundreds of fans hoping to watch their team pull off a shock or two. Whatever the outcome, Roberts will be watching from his South Coast home in hope rather than expectation.
“I’m going to try and be positive here but it’s not easy” he explains.
“GB is 22nd in the world rankings and the closest to us in our group is France, miles ahead in 13th.
GB dining at the top table (Pic by IHUK)
“But the rankings are compiled from four years’ results so perhaps we can ignore this. Instead, let’s focus on the fact that Peter Russell and the team have been together a while now and Pete has done the same as Alex Dampier did in the early 1990s, take the squad up two levels in two years, so there’s obviously some close camaraderie there.
“As always in today’s game a lot will depend on our goaltending. After a slow start, Ben Bowns seems to be back in form but Jackson Whistle and the Steelers are having a mare of a season. It will also be important for the team not to be downcast by the inevitable heavy defeats by the likes of – gulp! – Canada, USA and Finland.
“In the end, staying up will be a matter of luck, hoping to get a few bounces and praying that many of the opposition’s best players will be tied up in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
“Thanks to Freesports, I shan’t be going to Slovakia. Anyway, have you seen the prices the IIHF are charging? Outrageous! And I can’t get a press pass these days.”
Back to domestic matters and in truth there are few better placed to discuss the current British hockey league structure with the added context of decades of in-depth knowledge and experience. Indeed in June 2013 Roberts was inducted into British ice hockey’s Hall of Fame by the members of Ice Hockey Journalists UK and has pretty much seen it all before.
Last summer the second tier of the UK game (the English Premier League) collapsed, leaving turmoil in the lower tiers with mismatched teams and budgets thrown together in a scenario many long-time observers of the game understood was another cycle of change all too familiar. Crucially for the Professional top tier, the Elite League, stability and growth were for once the order of the day, something Roberts is keen to acknowledge.
“The Elite League. It’s in its 16th season, right? Wow! Who’d have thought it?” he says, with a nod to well-founded cynicism in the UK game.
“This is the longest any top level British league has lasted, bar none. OK, there’s very few British trained players in its ranks, probably not many more than there were in the 1950s.
“But that’s because we fans love to watch ‘good’ ice hockey more than we do ‘British’ ice hockey. Sure we’d all love to see more Brits but this is what happens when the grassroots culture is ‘sport for all’ rather than ‘excellence’.
“Personally, I’m enjoying the league’s speed, skill and competitiveness more than I’ve enjoyed any ice hockey since I first became a fan in the early 1960s. My one regret about not writing the Annual any more is that I can’t congratulate the owners on coming up with such a sound business model and apparently working together more harmoniously than any other previous group of owners. Not that they should get too complacent, it’s not a very high bar!
“As a long-time advocate of getting fighting out of hockey, it’s great that the league have signed so many players based on their skill with the puck and their skating speed, and so few goons – though a few clubs don’t yet appear to have got this message.
NIHL action between Streatham and the Raiders
“I can only recall seeing a handful of fights in Guildford this season. British ice hockey will always be a minority sport but it would be good to think it might at last be on the road to becoming a respectable one.”
Regarding the lower tiers and indeed the mooted proposals for a second tier to act as the solution to the current issues caused by the aforementioned collapse of the EPL. Roberts is understandably less optimistic that this puzzle is any closer to being solved.
“The NIHL games I’ve seen at Streatham and Romford in the last 12 months have been very watchable despite the small budgets” he admits.
“These clubs are unlikely to be making much, if any profit so I think talk of bringing back a semi-pro league is silly. The sport undoubtedly needs a league predominantly staffed by up-and-coming Brits but it doesn’t appear to me to be any more financially viable than it was two years ago.”
As ever, Roberts’ thoughts are difficult to argue with, and his opinions informed. His contribution to UK ice hockey is undisputed and thankfully his love of the game still burns bright, even if his desk lamp no longer does.
To find out more about the Ice Hockey Annual and order back copies (where available) click HERE.
Contact the author: carrsy2@gmail.com
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