The OCC is sticking to its guns and making everyone play by the rules this season. As someone somewhere on the spectrum, I welcome this zero tolerance policy, because what's the point of rules if they are not adhered to? I realise that my club may come unstuck at some point, but should we fall foul of something and get penalised, I hope we will take it on the chin and make changes to stop it happening again.
And this new, stricter policy means that the starring regulations are being properly enforced. I am not directly involved in the starring, but I get the impression that things have been allowed to slide recently. This is not the case this season, and the moment a player misses two games, he has to be replaced.
This can be problematic.
Starring is essential, by the way. It ensures that players play at their level (more or less), and whilst the under the line rule means that some players can drop to levels that should be beneath them, no system is perfect, and at least we all get the opportunity to take advantage (unless a club has only one team, but there is not much that can be done to redress this).
However, the rules as they stand cause issues that it seems to me are accidental, and I wonder if it might be worth a discussion about possible changes. We will have to make an alteration to our first team starring after the next game, and this will be caused because a player missed a game taking part in a charity fun run and will miss the next game because he will be out of the country with his family. The thing is though, he is a first team player. He has played in the first team and the first team only for the last few years. And assuming he is available for the next game, the person who has had to replace him could conceivably find himself without a game, through no fault of his own. This is not why the rules exist. They don't exist to punish a player who has been sacrificed to make up a starring position. This is an unfortunate by-product.
I understand why the two game rule exists, but I am not sure it does what it is supposed to do.
So, I propose that clubs should be allowed to name eight players (above the line) for their first team at the start of the season, have these approved, and that these players should/could remain in place throughout the season (with certain caveats in place). Clearly, if a player is not featuring at all (because of injury for example), then he would have to be replaced. It just seems to me that there are entirely reasonable reasons why a player might miss two or three games in a row - we are just amateurs, after all. The OCC is working hard to try and ensure that all players are playing at an appropriate level, so coming up with a core of eight players should be a fairly easy thing to establish.
I think that things get a little blurrier when we get down to second, third, fourth teams etc, and this core would be more difficult to define, but to do it for every clubs firsts would at least alleviate some issues.
Am I looking to fix something that isn't broken, or are other clubs having similar issues?