The NZ Warriors Curse
Preternatural Warriors Woes, Life in the Olympic Village & Goals/Tunes
Podcast
TNC Variety Show - Episode 25
The Niche Cast: Golden Generations
Reading Menu
Breezing Through The NZ Team’s Best Medal Hopes At The Tokyo Olympics (Olympics)
Monday Morning Dummy Half: Junior Pauga/Tukimihia Simpkins Kiwi-NRL Debuts (NRL)
Further Adventures In Aotearoa Olympic Football Preparation (Football)
Scotty’s Word
The NZ Warriors Curse…
Every year it seems as though I reach a point where I don’t know what to write about NZ Warriors. As always, I try to let emotions simmer and then approach with as few emotions as possible so I don’t reach this point out of anger or ‘fuck the Warriors’ type of stuff. I simply don’t know how to assess Warriors performances when this juncture is reached and I now know this juncture well as it’s a lovely annual activity.
There is interesting angles to take, mainly how the Warriors are working through their junior pipelines. As far as the NRL team goes and coming up with insights though, there just isn’t much to offer on a weekly basis. Once again, when I work through the emotions and come out the other side with a mellow approach; I’m amazed by the magic involved of a club rolling through the same general woes over 25 years regardless of who the people are involved.
Genuinely amazed. Whether these folks are owners, coaches, staff, players - it does not matter. This weekend saw Phil Gould take up an opportunity with Bulldogs and I was all on board with Gould having a role with the Warriors, only for him to gap it and link up with the Bulldogs. I celebrated Gould’s initial rejection of this Bulldogs offer a few weeks ago, only for Gould make the move.
All my research suggests that the Bulldogs ramped up their offer to Gould to make it tricky to reject further. Sure, covid stuff played a part and all that but if Gould really wanted to, he could have found a way. Finding a way becomes less attractive when there is a large, local offer from a club that Gould has history with.
It is what it is.
A day after the Gould stuff, then we have the injury toll from the Sunday afternoon loss to Penrith Panthers. Never expected the Warriors to win that game, injuries made it rather difficult to actually snare a win. None of what happened this weekend is new though, maybe new in the sense of different ways the curse is manifested but the general idea of optimism being flipped into ‘wtf’ has been prevalent throughout the club’s history.
Any time there is a good moment, a bad moment is right around the corner. That has been a staple of Warriors footy on the field, as well as off the field and some examples that come to mind are Sam Tomkins being whatever he was, Ivan Cleary taking the club to a Grand Final then departing, Roger Tuivasa-Sheck suffering a knee injury just as his first Warriors season was heating up. Eric Watson and Sir Owen Glenn had weird moments, Manu Vatuvei fell victim to the streets and I’m sure you’ve got some more tucked away in your memories.
Maybe there was some bad juju going back to 1995. However deep you want to get into this, I am all in on the Warriors being cursed by some dark magic. Individuals are only important here because through the plight of different individuals, we see the Warriors curse being played out. It’s not the individuals who are cursed or are bringing their historical trauma/karma to the Warriors, the Warriors as an entity is cursed and that covers everyone involved.
This isn’t a stretch, right? We can all feel it, we all know that some type of mishap is coming and maybe part of a curse is that the curse becomes self-fulfilling. We have all experienced this curse in various ways, so while we should all be thinking positive thoughts and putting positive energy out to receive as such, the curse flips that around to ensure that positive thoughts struggle to fight through the muck. Beat down by years of the curse, all we know is the curse and maybe Kyrie Irving can help?
I have thought about Mt Smart and whether Mt Smart was the location of some historical trauma. The Warriors have not played at Mt Smart for almost two years though and definitely won’t return to their home ground this year. We could call up Mr Irving for some sage-advice, but what’s the point of cleaning out the energy of Mt Smart when the Warriors haven’t played their for yonks and are still up to their neck in the curse.
Perhaps Mt Smart could be like a Taniwha, groaning at the absence of his team and thus invoking further dark arts (cross-Tasman darks arts is impressive). I reckon Mt Smart plays some kinda role in all of this, yet the power of this curse is evident in every tentacle of the Warriors being touched regardless of individuals or a lone thing such as Mt Smart Stadium.
Awareness is the key. I am aware - that’s all it takes. Through my journey I have always been eager to go a step beyond awareness where I am aware of a thought and then take it further to try and sort it out, only to get to a point where now it’s all about awareness. I am aware and that’s it, nothing more needs to be done.
I am aware of the NZ Warriors curse.
Wildcard’s Notebook
Countdown to New Zealanders Scoring Goals In 3... 2... 1...
And let’s chuck in an assist for Dyer as well over in Canada...
Kiwi footballers providing goals for their clubs, only a couple more days before we get to see them providing goals (hopefully) for their country at the Tokyo Olympics. The Football Ferns are on first, they play Aussie at 11.30pm on Wednesday, so that’ll be a late one, then the OlyWhites face South Korea on Thursday at 8pm. Set the reminders now it’s gonna be wild.
Olympia
These Olympics are going to be the strangest ones on record, no doubt about it. The Japanese public don’t want them, which lucky for them they won’t have to really have anything to do with it unless they’re volunteering because spectators are no longer gonna be allowed in. That’s already gonna add an air of strangeness to the events – albeit we’ve all had plenty of experience of watching sports without fans in attendance on telly by now.
But the pandemic isn’t only a cautionary thing for the Tokyo Games, it’s also a very present threat as multiple athletes have already tested positive in the village. Bradley Beal’s had to pull out of the USA basketball team due to covid precautions. Japan as a nation ticked over 3000 new covid cases on three consecutive days last week and it’s still been a four-figure sum every day since. 15000 people have died from covid in Japan. They’re into their fourth state of emergency of the pandemic. Now travellers from almost every country on the planet are descending on their biggest city so make of that what you will.
But these are the Olympics so nothing was gonna stop them from going ahead. Plus in all fairness we’ve had plenty of examples of major events taking place under bubble/lockdown type scenarios to take lessons from, with the huge financial weight that made these games so un-cancellable also allowing them room to go to every possible measure to ensure they can happen as safely as possible. None of the athletes are there against their wills. They’re Olympians. They’ve been making personal sacrifices to these ends their entire lives. And the Olympic Village should be pretty much isolated from regular society.
From what I’ve seen and read, nobody who attends the game – not athletes, coaches, journalists, etc – can go until they’ve had two negative tests before travelling. Then when they get to Tokyo there’s a short quarantine period during which they’re tested every day. There’s no welcoming procedures at the village. No media coverage either. Mingling is kept to a minimum... and you’re not allowed in until five days before you begin competing and you have to be outta there within two days of the end of your final event. Apparently there are 18k people gonna be in and out of the village (which is 44 hectares in size, damn). Masks are mandatory. There’s a 24 hour medical clinic on site if you get ill. There’s also a designated hotel outside the village for those who are expelled to quarantine. Some more yarns here...
Village residents are permitted to only travel to places they have outlined in activity plans in advance and are prohibited from walking freely outside the site or to visit tourist spots, as well as restaurants and bars. They are advised to keep physical distancing, including when eating at the main dining hall, which will provide up to 45,000 meals a day ranging from Japanese, Western and Asian to halal, vegetarian and gluten-free cuisine, and at the casual dining hall focusing on popular and traditional Japanese dishes.
On the relief side of all this, they reckon 80% of athletes will be fully vaccinated by the time they arrive so that’s helpful. Won’t necessarily prevent the spread of the disease but it will make it harder for the virus to do so and when viruses don’t spread they die, that’s how this game works. You have to be exposed to it to catch it so the fewer exposure points out there the better – if every covid case spreads it to fewer than 1 person on average then eventually it goes away, right? Dunno when if ever we’ll get to a “it goes away” stage but think of it as a sliding scale and the closer we get to that stage the better we’ll be. Then take the enclosed environment of the Olympic Village as a test case and fingers cross that the inevitable cases that do arise will be outliers.
On a less serious but still clever ingenuity note...
I’m also very much enjoying these Matisse Thybulle video blogs for a closer look at daily life on the journey...
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