Tag Archives: new zealand

A Shallow Dive into the 2021 New Zealand Warriors

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What a season for the Warriors. A top twelve finish gave them something to write home about. The New Zealand franchise won just as many games (8) as basket case club, the Wests Tigers, but with a slightly less disastrous points difference (-171). The second season on the road was probably just as tough as the first, except it was about 50% longer and this year the Warriors had to play under Nathan Brown. Nonetheless, the Titans now have more finals appearances in the last decade, so that’s something for everyone to think about.

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The Victory Lap

From the pre-season deep dive:

Nathan Brown, Phil Gould and Cameron George have enough combined idiocy to act as the four horsemen of New Zealand football’s apocalypse, despite there only being three of them. If they could sign someone in the vein of Keegan Hipgrave, this metaphor would be a lot more satisfying.

…[T]he Warriors (along with the Dragons) are one of my favourites for the wooden spoon in 2021. I had them pegged in a similar position last season but, despite the difficult circumstances in which they played, their coaching got them through with enough wins and panache to avoid the bottom four… the Warriors are [now] being led by the man who has the worst coaching factor of the last five years, including the all-time worst NRL season… I have little confidence in Brown’s ability to unite the squad and motivate them while they live away from home for another year. Under normal circumstances and a better coach, there’s enough potential production for the Warriors to look good for a top eight finish.

If you need to understand the level of savvy Phil Gould brings to the boardroom, one only need look at how much better Penrith are running without him and that Roger Tuivasa-Scheck has already decided to go to union next year. Cameron George, a NRL club CEO, is a refsfaulter and seems to get most of his ideas from talkback radio.

I really wondered if I’d gone too far on this at several points in the season. Then the Warriors were in fourteenth with a 5-13 record after round 19, the worst performance to that point in the season since 1999 (5-12 by round 19, also in fourteenth place). There were seasons in between where the Warriors were running dead last and still had more wins than they did this year. They were, by their own standards, terrible.

There were three reasons no one noticed. The first being that no one wants to pile on a bunch of guys living away from home for an extended period, making sacrifices in the popular parlance. The second is that these are the New Zealand Warriors and I’m convinced the average NRL pundit and the average NRL punter are not aware that there is a team based in New Zealand in this competition. The third is that there were at least two teams, and probably several more, that were somehow worse.

What happened

The Warriors started the season with the sixth best roster by pre-season projections. Don’t believe me? Here’s a graph.

Now let’s check in with how the team actually performed against those expectations.

That doesn’t look good. If only there were some warning about a gross under performance.

(The above graph should read 2016 – 2021, my apologies)

Oh. Well, I’m sure this is Wayne Bennett’s fault somehow. Phil Gould can help get things on the right track.

Oh. Well, at least Cameron George has his eye on the ball.

Source: Cameron George’s LinkedIn

Oh.

There’s always next year

Phil Gould couldn’t even be bothered seeing out the season and took a more lucrative offer at the Bulldogs. Nathan Brown is still doing Nathan Brown things. Cameron George is the proverbial immovable barncale on the ass of this franchise. Matt Lodge is the face of your club now. Accept it, Warriors fans. I had to boo through it for sixty-five games, now its your turn. At least he can play the role of Keegan Hipgrave from the opening metaphor.

Roger Tuivasa-Scheck is gone and he’s not coming back. He saw the writing on the wall early and bailed for union. Smart. The Warriors organisation took this as a personal slight and instead of trying to win games and make the finals in the easiest season in living memory, they punted a Dally M winner to the wing to make room for a precocious child who had not shown any real promise in an actual football game to that point. Walsh’s marginally above average .123 in QCup was perhaps not indicative of the shit hot five weeks of form he hit while smothering what was left of Tuivasa-Scheck’s NRL career (TPR .224). It was, however, definitely indicative of the mediocre .109 Walsh put up from round 12 onwards. People tried to argue with me that moving Walsh to fullback was a bad idea. The numbers don’t lie.

Shaun Johnson returns to Auckland-on-Moreton-Bay for a two year contract to revive the good old days of 2011, when the Warriors were relevant enough to lose a grand final. I’m sure the Warriors will look good on paper in 2022, just as I’m certain they will under-deliver.

A Shallow Dive into the 2020 New Zealand Warriors

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It’s probably not worth considering what I thought of the Warriors pre-season (it was that they would be bad). The coronavirus pandemic threw everything into disarray and no club bore more of the brunt than the Warriors.

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Summary

The change from a regular home and away season to a permanent road trip could have gone one of two ways: either the Warriors would mentally collapse or the pressure would bind them together. Fortunately for them, it was the latter under the temporary leadership of Todd Payten, finishing tenth with a 8-12 record. Payten replaced Stephen Kearney at the helm, after Kearney was surprisingly let go in the middle of a extremely challenging season that would have been a write-off before the pandemic.

What happened

I don’t know how much reliable information can be gleaned from such an unusual year for one specific club. One thing I am interested in is measuring the differences in performances under Kearney (rounds 1 through 6) and Payten (rounds 7 to 20) to see if it was worth punting him.

(Here is a brief guide to some of the stats used)

Given what we saw from Kearney in 2020 was largely in line with what we had previously seen (2018’s annus mirabilis run to eighth place aside), the Warriors are probably vindicated in their decision to replace him with Payten. However, that’s a decision that came with an unbearable amount of risk attached to it. The metrics haven’t turned around a lot, although the winning percentage was somewhat better and most of the players seemed to step up. Management perhaps should consider themselves lucky that they got away with it.

Funnily enough, Payten didn’t feel like sticking around, even though the job was reportedly his for the taking. He opted to go to Townsville and coach the Cowboys for family reasons. Personally, I can understand not wanting to work for an organisation that punts their coach while he’s embedded with the team in another country for no-one-knows-how-long during a pandemic. Whether Payten is legit head coaching material will be tested under more normal circumstances in 2021.

What’s next

It’s quite the triumvirate of talented leadership that the Warriors have assembled to take them into 2021.

Consultant, Phil Gould:

Coach, Nathan Brown:

CEO, Cameron George:

We’re about to see what happens when sports talkback callers run a NRL club.

2019 Pacific Tests Tips, State of Origin Previews and Other Rep Weekend Stuff

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For rugby league nerds, this weekend is the true rugby league Christmas. We have a phenomenal mix of men’s and women’s games, featuring top line players representing teams from all over the southern hemisphere. There’s a World Cup qualifier in Sydney between the Cook Islands and South Africa. There’s two State of Origin matches, one for each cisgender. We have two women’s internationals, featuring Samoa, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Fiji, as well as the NRL’s Pacific Invitational with the same teams, except that famously Pacific nation, Lebanon, plays in lieu of New Zealand. The Kiwis will instead be facing down arch rivals Mate Ma’a Tonga to avenge their 2017 World Cup embarrassment in the opening fixture of the new Oceania Cup.

(Also worth a look this weekend in boring old club football: London Broncos vs Hull Kingston Rovers in a relegation battle. Kickoff 4.45AM AEST on Friday)

It’s a feast of rugby league and significantly more tantalising than what the NRL has served up lately. Here’s a bit of insight into each.

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Are the Warriors the most inconsistent team in the NRL?

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Despite being set an 18 point line, the Warriors managed to run the Storm close on ANZAC Day in Melbourne. Were it not for a dubious decision or two in the closing phase of the game, the Aucklanders might have left AAMI Park with the win. That led to people, including me, wondering out loud via social media where that level of play had come from, especially compared to some of the Warriors’ earlier displays this season.

Some people suggested the Warriors in Melbourne was a Thing. We only need to remember last year’s 50-10 drubbing to dispel that but also recall that the Warriors have a 7-13-1 record in Melbourne, with an average margin of thirteen points in the Storm’s favour.

So what gives?

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Analysis – Another bloody mid-season review (Part II)

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With the conclusion of round 14, it’s just over half time in the 2017 NRL season. It’s the ideal time to do what everyone else is doing and look back at the season so far. This week we’re looking at the back half of the NRL.

Part I, from Brisbane to Newcastle, was last week.

Benchmarks

A reminder of the benchmarks that define each place on the ladder –

wins positions

And where grand finalists and premiers come from on the ladder –

gf positions

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Club Report – New Zealand Warriors

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war-badgeBackground

The Auckland Warriors, as they were originally known, were introduced to the competition in 1996, the first expansion team from outside of Australia.

In the heady days of Stacey Jones’ leadership, the team became contenders, winning a minor premiership in 2002 and only falling at the last hurdle in the grand final to the Sydney Roosters. The team would be deep into the finals again in 2003 before being eliminated in the preliminary final by eventual premiers Penrith.

The Warriors went through a period of re-building after Jones left the club in 2005, culminating in another grand final appearance in 2011 under coach Ivan Cleary. While NZ would ultimately lose out to Manly, the Warriors have since maintained a level of adequacy that is neither inspiring nor depressing. The team is struggling to make an impact this year and has faced an unfair call to be dropped from the competition despite never having copped a wooden spoon.

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