Preparedness
Warriors vs Sharks aftermath, All Whites at the World Cup, Blackcaps/Kane Williamson, White Ferns, Charlisse Leger-Walker, and more
Scotty’s Word
NZ Warriors have lost two games in a row. Not ideal but a younger group has executed the long grind style of play and these experiences will be crucial later in the season. Seven of the top-20 didn’t play against Sharks and Sam Healey’s the only guy I don’t have as a top-10 player. Roger Tuivasa-Sheck and Tanah Boyd are out for the season with knee injuries. Kurt Capewell and Mitch Barnett are doing Aussie things. Leka Halasima got injured vs Panthers and James Fisher-Harris was a late withdrawal for the Sharks loss.
The best NZW stuff came in the second half once they had laid the foundations of gritty footy. Wayde Egan was busier around the ruck, Te Maire Martin started bouncing away from the defensive pressure and the outside backs went from running it straight to finding small gaps (DWZ styles). That included Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad making the most of his opportunity on the wing too.
Told you Makaia Tafua loved to whack in tackles. The younger players didn’t shine but they went deep into the set-for-set mangroves and played their roles in excellent defence on their tryline. Seeing this group of emerging players combine organised defence and crazy scramble efforts is a fabulous indicator of how the development pipeline is working.
NZW loss because they failed in the winning moments. Egan’s sloppy pass from dummy half to Martin, who went slow-mo through his droppie attempt. Pushing a pass/dropsies during a linebreak. Pompey didn’t look like he really wanted that kick at goal, so he missed it.
That is an example of everything you don’t want to do when trying to win a game by droppie. There were a couple runs that were barely runs (Demitric Vaimauga bounced on the spot) so the defence hadn’t made repeat efforts. NZW went too close to the tryline and made it very predictable for the defence to pounce.
The funny thing is that Luke Metcalf’s best attribute is his winning plays. Last season Metcalf would miss half the conversions, sometimes playing mediocre, and then make the winning play. Metcalf was good in NSW Cup but everyone in that team played well and it’s tricky to compare him to the NRL team because his NSW Cup team won their physical battle, while the NRL team lost theirs.
Metcalf was playing on the front footy ... in reserve grade. He should have classy touches in that setting. You know what else happened in the NSW Cup win vs Newtown? Jett Cleary had 14 runs - 147m @ 10.5m/run. He had a late shift from hooker to halves but one of his early runs was a dummy half run for 29m. In a team with awesome runners (Luke Hanson, Jye Linnane, Sio Kali, Christian Sikuvea, Jason Salalilo), Cleary was the best runner.
Also big up Jack Thompson for this dummy half run.
Hanson played fullback and played well. He seems most likely to depart NZW with Metcalf in the glut of halves, but if he’s also covering fullback then Hanson could stick around. I reckon Hanson could offer fullback depth behind Taine Tuaupiki and Nicoll-Klokstad, ready to play right now unlike the younger Joseph Ratcliffe.
I don’t believe in a ‘home advantage’ for NZW at Mt Smart. It’s weird because I prefer their crowds in Aussie, plus they go crazy in Christchurch so get ready for that. Wellington went kinda crazy for the Anzac game and they genuinely seem to help NZW. I’ve watched many teams win at Mt Smart during the two Andys era, including finals games and two of the four losses so far this season were at the temple.
So I don’t stress about the Mt Smart factor for finals footy. Regardless of where they play, the Warriors will draw big support in Australia during finals and I believe they are just as good in Aussie as they are on home soil.
I’m lacking juice at the moment so I have some quick yarns about the Blackcaps batting situation including the best emerging options, White Ferns deep cuts and Kristian Clarke’s first game of County Championship cricket. But wait…
Blackcaps have not played at The Oval since 1999. They have played seven Tests at Lord’s since 2000 with five losses and two draws.
Why have Kane Williamson, Tim Southee and Trent Boult had such icky retirements? I don’t think Boult has actually retired, he just drifted into T20 obscurity. Southee hung around during a steep decline and folks were kinda over him by the end. Williamson retired mid series. That’s awkward for Blackcaps in this series but Williamson’s murky commitment made developing emerging talent tricky.
Izzy Gaze is a wicket-keeper who struggles to catch the ball cleanly.
Rosemary Mair is a T20 bowler averaging over 100 in two consecutive years.
That wasn’t a shock win for West Indies because they beat White Ferns in Aotearoa during the 2022 ODI World Cup. Same clumsy cricket, same gloomy looks from the players and staff on the sidelines.
Musical jam...
Nick’s Notebook
The World Cup is underway and it is Matchday-Minus-One for the All Whites who face Iran at 1pm Tuesday NZT. Probably our most winnable game considering how much drama the Iranians are having to deal with simply to partake at all... sounds like Matt Garbett may have picked up a knock though and Ryan Thomas probably isn’t fit enough to start. Fortunately our attacking midfield stocks run pretty deep so we can make that work if need be.
This is a talented squad that’s been playing together for long enough that they don’t really have too many set combinations that we rely upon. We can go between our two goalies, between different centre-back duos, between various attacking support staff for Chris Wood… and it doesn’t make a major difference. Most of our best guys are established enough that they’ve played for multiple clubs in multiple countries and have experienced enough club success that they know what it takes. The worry I have is that we haven’t done much as an international team... and thus it remains to be seen how much mongrel we’ve got when it matters most.
There was a brilliant example of that when Australia beat Türkiye 2-0 on Sunday. Outstanding defensive shift for ninety minutes by the Aussies who have been getting taunted by their opponents (especially the Americans) since the draw was done but channelled that into some fair dinkum motivation. Turkey’s captain Hakan Çalhanoğlu (of Inter Milan) said the day before the match that his squad was more talented and would dominate... and he was right. They are and they did. But what they didn’t do was score any goals within that dominance and the 2010 All Whites could tell you about how that works. Especially at a World Cup where the pressure can do funny things and discipline, aggression, focus, and efficiency can overcome the talent gap. It happens all the time.
The worry is that the All Whites have spent years trying to expand their playing style to become better on the ball but it’s the defence that’ll determine what we’re capable of and we have to hope we haven’t lost those 2010 recipes. It’d be a lot easier to predict this stuff if we’d qualified last time and these guys actually had some tournament experience to fall back upon – every game we’ve played outside our confederation this cycle was a friendly. No intercontinental qualifiers. No Nations League or Euros/AFCON/Asia Cup/etc like other nations are able to indulge in. We basically never get to play against better nations where both teams are going hundies. Bring back the Confederations Cup, that's what I say.
2026 World Cup Nations That New Zealand Has Played During This Cycle
L 0-1 vs England in June 2026
L 0-4 vs Haiti in June 2026
L 0-2 vs Ecuador in November 2025
L 1-2 vs Colombia in November 2025
D 1-1 vs Norway in October 2025
L 1-3 & L 0-1 vs Australia in September 2025
W 1-0 vs Ivory Coast in June 2025
D 1-1 vs USA in September 2024
L 0-3 vs Mexico in September 2024
D 0-0 vs Tunisia in March 2024
L 0-1 vs Egypt in March 2024
L 0-2 vs Australia (again) in October 2023
D 1-1 vs DR Congo in October 2023
NR (1-0 at HT) vs Qatar in June 2023
L 1-4 vs Sweden in June 2023
That’s all during the Darren Bazeley reign. Somehow we managed to tick off 14/47 of the other World Cup qualifiers and it could have been more had Greece, Ireland, Ukraine, Poland, Chile, or Finland qualified. That’s a decent amount of games giving us a decent idea of where the All Whites are at... with 1 win, 4 draws, and 9 losses (plus a no result which we were winning at the time but abandoned because Qatar got racist to Michael Boxall... and then FIFA did nothing about it).
Again, it’s tough to judge because these were all friendlies and there’s that extra 10% that comes out in the World Cup which we’ll have to wait and see if New Zealand possesses. Only three of those games got away from us though (Sweden, Mexico, Haiti). Keeping in mind that the England game was a training exercise from their perspective, the teams that impressed me most when we played them were Ecuador, Mexico, and... yeah to be honest probably Australia in those games last year where Nestroy Irankunda and Mo Toure made such a big difference.
There were two selections that Tony Popovich made with that Socceroos side yesterday that came out of the blue. One was Patrick Beach getting the start in goal (many thought he was there to be GK3) and Paul Okon-Engstler getting the start in midfield. Both are A-League players... at least for now. And both recently gained some valuable schooling at The Port University:
Beach plays for Melbourne City so his season ended with a penalty shootout defeat to Auckland FC in the elimination final, with Michael Woud getting to live the goalkeeping shootout heroics instead
Okon-Engstler plays for Sydney FC so his season ended in a grand final defeat to Auckland FC with Cam Howieson, his opposite man in the midfield, becoming an instant legend by scoring the winner
All you paid subscribers can enjoy some Kane Williamson/Blackcaps/Tom Latham stats in the bonus section… started off looking at how Williamson bossed the number three position and then somehow that turned into Latham’s ducks but you’ll have to subscribe for the explanation
Must be time for a check-in with Charlisse Leger-Walker who has been going about her business more quietly for Connecticut Sun in the WNBA since their starting point guard, Leila Lacan, returned to the team (after wrapping up an MVP/Finals MVP run in the French league). That’s given CLW a more defined bench back-up PG role after moving in and out of the starting five through those initial nine games. That was her audition period and she did well enough to stay on the main roster ahead of Hailey van Lith who was dropped to a development player spot (willingly – as HVL could have signed elsewhere on waivers but wanted to stick around for her development). Nothing wrong with that for CLW’s development either... although a bench role does mean limited action and lesser stats.
After never playing less than 16 minutes in her first nine games (without Lacan), CLW has dropped to an average of 14 min/gm since then. The two games immediately after Lacan’s arrival are the only two games in which she hasn’t made a field goal (held scoreless entirely in the second of those, a loss vs Atlanta). She’s been building back out of that more recently though, finding her footing amongst the bench unit and continuing to provide a calming presence as a ball-handler. She had four assists in 14 mins in the loss vs Indiana on Sunday NZT. Snapped out of her three-pointer drought too. These are all solid development areas for a rookie.
Charlisse Leger-Walker since Laila Lacan returned (6 games)...
14.0 MIN | 2.8 PTS | 0.7 REB | 2.3 AST | 1.0 STL | 1.5 TOV | 1.7 PF
This after she averaged 8.1 points and 2.7 assists up until that point. But that point was always coming so no dramas there. What Leger-Walker needs to do to continue increasing her bench minutes is to knock down a few more threes. She had a wee slump over the last week or two which has spoiled her overall numbers but she began 8/21 which shows she’s equally capable of a hot streak. Overall CLW has shot 9/31 (29.0%) from three-pointers so far... with a curious split across the quarters:
1/7 in first quarters
0/4 in second quarters
5/8 in third quarters
3/12 in fourth quarters
There’s a similar trend in her overall shooting/scoring where she’s scored 34 points in 3Qs, shooting 52.2% from the field (out of 90 total points shooting 38.1% overall)... though she hasn’t actually seen much court time in the third since Lacan’s return – usually subbed in with three or four mins to go and then getting a similar stretch in the fourth before the starters return. Having said that, they finished yesterday’s game with Lacan and CLW on the court together. Been wanting to see more of that – CLW played with Kiki Rice at UCLA so there’s no dramas with her adapting with a second PG on the floor.
Lacan and CLW have spent 17 mins on the floor together across those six games (they’ve tried it in 4/6 of those games) so it’s something the Sun seem to be building towards. They’ve been outscored by 17 points in those 17 minutes but they get outscored with most line-ups, that’s what it’s like on a 2-13 team, hence we can’t overreact to that. It’s the 144.1 Defensive Rating that’s the problem. Bit awkward trying to gel alongside a player who didn’t join the team until two weeks deep into the season. Call it a work in progress.
Musical Jam...
