Thus we cross the Cook Strait and find ourselves in the gorgeous Marlborough region. Good wine, great beaches, a vibrant art scene... and after some initial hideousness a fair dose of decent football as well.
If they don’t get to crack back into it and this is truly the end of the season, well, it’s been real. Third place on the ladder is already a record for the Wellington Phoenix. Two wins and a draw out of their last six games and they’d have bagged a record points total too.
Now it’s the turn of the rest of the North Island for their little Premmy Files season roundups. Waitakere United, Hamilton Wanderers, and Hawke’s Bay United, in that order – which is both the order of north to south and also the order they finished on the table.
And with that we cap one of the all time great W-League seasons from Melbourne City and one of the all-time great Flying Kiwis runs as well from Rebekah Stott. To be fair she does this every year with Melly City... but these last few months have been one some whole other buzz.
While ACFC have the star signings and the ex-pros and they snatched up their closest rivals’ manager when they needed one... Team Wellington’s success this season has been a little easier to sleep on.
Look, it’s not how they will have wanted to do it. But as Joe Pesci whispered to Robert De Niro to tell Al Pacino: It is what it is. They picked up the Charity Cup this past weekend with a win over Eastern Suburbs and follow that up now with an eighth Premiership championship and an eleventh premiers title.
Not really sure what the next couple weeks are going to be like especially but no dramas, we’ll keep on serving up what we’ve got to serve up and stay chilling in this state of flux.
Football around the world may be taking a bit of a break for the foreseeable future but in our relative isolation the Premiership gets to continue and we had here, for the first time in a month, a full weekend of fixtures to chew upon and digest (don’t forget to wash your hands).
It was to be the final time that the Wellington Phoenix could play at home this season and it was a glorious way to say farewell. A 3-0 win over Melbourne Victory during which the team was excellent throughout.
Conceding these late winners hits harder with the early starts. 5am is a ruthless time to be getting up to see the Fernies lose another close one, but it’s a feeling we’re kinda used to these days.
After the toothless gumming they gave Newcastle last week until Chris Wood was chucked on, there was little doubt that he’d be out there and starting as Tottenham Hotspur came to visit... on a bit of a dud streak themselves in contrast with Burnley’s quality run. Nice time to be playing them.
Here we are with only two Premiership games to talk about. Two very good Premiership games but at the same time it’s a chance to catch your breath before the rollercoaster hits that downward surge.
Progress doesn’t happen on a steady scale. The evidence of deeper improvements aren’t always obvious as they happen. Following on from the Footy Ferns looking mostly pretty good in the shootout win over Belgium they then had to face an Italian side that had made the quarter-finals of the World Cup last year.
It wasn’t even that good of a performance, to be honest. The Wellington Phoenix went to Central Coast knowing that the Mariners were vulnerable on the back of seven – count ‘em, seven – consecutive defeats and they figured they could just sit back and punish the mistakes that CCM made.
People seem to think penalties are a lottery for some reason. It’s a cliche in football but that cliche is wrong. They’re not a lottery at all, they’re an extreme refinement of the ultimate purpose of the sport. Ball. Goal. Person trying to stop ball from going into goal.
Here was a fella ideally placed to take the club into a glorious future where young players are given a chance, where the academy is a major focus, and where those things don’t come at the expense of success on the park, quite the contrary. And if those young players develop enough to gather further hefty transfer fees then all the merrier.
This is where the Kiwi x MLS yarn begins to take some context. We’ve got eight dudes in the MLS this season but having contracts and being influential players are very different things. Noah Billingsley and James Musa didn’t make the matchday squad for Minny’s opener against the Portland Timbers... who themselves had Bill Tuiloma on the injury list.
By a quirk of fate, Waitakere United and Hamilton Wanderers played each other home and away in consecutive weeks. Down in Hamilton it was late drama for Kale Herbert’s boys as Xavier Pratt and George Ott both scored late and the Tron Wands won it 4-3.