The end of another season has lead to a minor explosion of statistics. As you can see above, we played 98 teams in 178 matches, scored 312 goals, conceded 437, won 66 games, lost 87, drew 25 and gained 221 lovely points, sadly not necessarily in all the right places. The club now enters a mysterious period during which the leagues decide how many teams go up and down and nobody really seems to be able to predict this until some point in about September.

That said, the Men’s leagues seem to have lined up their success measuring ducks ahead of schedule. Congratulations to the Men’s 1XI who are bouncing back up to Div 1 North having finished 2nd in what we hope was their first and final foray into Div 2. Men’s 2XI will be demoted to Div 5 North having finished 11th. One silver lining of demotion is an increased chance of success in the following season so keep chins up, just as the M1XI did this season. The Ladies’ 2XI may or may not be moving and the rest are probably staying where they are awaiting new friends to join them from the surrounding leagues. That said, the England Hockey objective of getting 12 teams into each league seems to be failing somewhat for some, so we may be in for surprises in the M4XI & M5XI leagues, which only had 8 teams each by the end of the season.

The keen eyed will spot an unfamiliar column, mainly due to the fact that I invented it this morning, labelled Success Factor. This uses a bespoke and rather amusing formula to try to represent how much success each team achieved during the season. It takes into account several factors and results in some interesting charts which I can’t figure out how to get into this article.

Success is not as straightforward as it might appear.