You may have missed the slight hyperbole - which I thought would have been rather obvious.
You may also be missing my point in that Ridden was only but one example - there are a lot of players locally, especially in a team like Cavvy, who look a lot better than they really are due to the current standard of local football, and this gets shown up on the national stage. Only way to close that gap is to try and improve the overall standard of our Premier League.
The tops clubs need to be playing in a South Island league asap. It's hard for local clubs to do well in the Chatham cup and national league when they face such poor poor opposition every week.