Appeared in November 2003 edition of  

Designed for Excel 97 and above.

 

                                                                                                              

I am an Englishman living in Wellington, New Zealand. I'm a Chartered Management Accountant, but have been working as a Consultant for Tenzing Ltd - who recently split from BearingPoint (formerly known as KPMG Consulting) since 1997. I mostly implement SAP. 

My hometown is Brighton, in the South of England. Naturally, I support Brighton & Hove Albion. At some point, I intend to return home and resume my place on the terraces. Not that we have terraces anymore since the demise of the Goldstone Ground (RIP), so I guess it will be to take my seat at the Falmer Stadium.

I am proud to be an inaugural member of the Wellington Phoenix - the first professional football club in Wellington and the only extant professional outfit in New Zealand - and am an active member of Yellow Fever.

I am the oldest teenager I know, often to the despair of my wife and daughter! I still play 5-a-side indoor football when I can and I'm a very good goalkeeper, although I may have lost some of the OTT intensity I exuded when player-managing Carden Athletic during the late 80s and early 90s!. For the full-size game, I used to play for Worthing United in the early 1990s (until a broken ankle required a metal plate and 8 pins) and have played for a few teams since coming to New Zealand.  I managed to break a finger on my left hand in 5-a-side and the thumb on my right hand for Karori Waterside in the same week in 1998 and failed to deliver particularly good performances for the Courtenay Arms United in 2000. I'm too short and lack the physical strength to be as good at 11-a-side as I am at 5-a-side, where my reactions and agility mean I can outshine most other goalkeepers. With deteriorating eyesight (which I really notice on a full-size pitch - might be time to consider contact lenses) and age taking its toll, I thought I was more or less retired from 11-a-side. I did get tempted out of retirement for the Island Bay Originals in 2002, assisting the team to the Capital Division 7 title, but 2003 and 2004 provided no playing opportunities as I spent almost all of my time working away in Thailand and Australia and confined myself to refereeing my daughter's matches whenever I was in Wellington. However, I played for the Island Bay Originals in 2004/05 Mount Albert Summer League - we finished runners-up and I was very flattered to be given the team player of the season award. I also played for Hagi in a 5-a-side summer league from January to March 2005 - we finished winners with a 100% record. I then spent three seasons with HHH United, who are affiliated to Island Bay, in Capital Division 4 and we achieved promotion from Capital 5 in 2006. For 2008, I returned to the Island Bay Originals - now  in Masters One. We have secured the 2008 Masters One championship. I continue with the  Mount Albert Summer League for whom I am now  the webmaster and I picked up the league player of the season award for the 2005/06 season.

As well as playing football, I have in the last few years acquired a taste for running marathons. Best time so far is 2 hours and 57 minutes.

Why do I do this?

Because I can! The New Zealand media's insistence at starving me of quality football coverage has caused my love of football to go to levels that it did not dare aspire to when still at home in England. Hence the unhealthy amount of time I spend writing spreadsheets for football. I'm gradually converting the Kiwis, but their irrational preoccupation for that minority sport (rugby) is hard to break down. 

One of the peripheral benefits of providing this service is that I learn new Excel and Visual Basic techniques every year. The other is that my wife knows I'm behaving if I'm working on a spreadsheet during one of my business trips!

Does anyone remember the cardboard football ladders that used to come with Shoot magazine every season? You could say that what I am doing is issuing the next generation of football ladders for all those Shoot readers that have now grown up.

Website history

I started creating league sheets for my own use only. If anyone remembers the sheets from the 1997/8 season, you'll know I've come a long way since then. They worked, but were very basic. For the 1998 World Cup Finals, a colleague (Jon Moore) asked for something more impressive. I locked myself away for the weekend and took Excel to places I'd not been before. I followed up with the 2000 European Championship Qualifiers and started getting emails from around the world.

The ISFA offered to host the sheets and for the next couple of years, the service snowballed. As the functionality and size of the spreadsheets grew, I realised that I could not rely on the hosting capability of other sites - especially around distributing bug fixes and updates.

I bought a book called Sam's Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours in May 2002. By chapter 7, I knew I had enough knowledge to create a basic site to offer the sheets through. I started off with a free site at Geocities, but the number of file downloads meant the site often went off-line due to exceeding data transfer limits.

Eventually, I decided that my hobby was satisfying enough to spend money on and bought a domain name and a paid site through Actrix. For NZ$25 per month, I figure I could have more expensive hobbies so don't begrudge offering my sheets for free when it actually costs me money. 

Now I have Microsoft Frontpage with which to develop the site. I'm glad I learnt how to write the code manually, but it's quicker and easier with Frontpage.

Last updated 22 October 2011