It’s been a great season for the New Zealand Warriors, right? Right?
The resurrection over the ditch since Andrew Webster took charge has been nothing short of extraordinary, especially considering where the club was over the previous three years. That much is indisputable.
Yet there is a feeling that they are still back on where they could be, that their current situation, sitting just inside the finals on nine wins, is actually an underperformance based on what they were capable of reaching earlier in the season.
Having stunned the NRL at the start of the year, they have lost two highly-winnable games against Origin-battered sides, and now face the prospect of the same happening again on Saturday in Parramatta.
Poor response to pressure has been a flaw of Warriors footy going back to as long as the team have been in the comp. When nobody expects them to be good, they are often great, but as soon as expectation creeps in, the Wahs are liable to collapse in a heap.
Look at their results: the nine wins have combined some huge, against the odds triumphs: the battering of the Cowboys on their own patch in Round 3 that staked their claim, the heroic comeback at Cronulla and the party-popping win at Canberra on Jarrod Croker’s 300th game.
The other six have all been against lower opposition: twice over the Bulldogs, a win at St George Illawarra in one of their worst weeks, at home to the Dolphins and Knights and a second victory over North Queensland while they were in the worst of their bad patch.
Now look at their seven defeats: Souths last week, the Broncos in week one of Origin, the Panthers at Magic Round, the Storm on Anzac Day, the Roosters home and away and the Knights in Newcastle.
Losing away in Melbourne, and losing to Panthers any time, is not a disaster. Newcastle are up and down, and their defeat at Allianz Stadium in Round 2 was more than creditable.
The three that stand out are the home defeats to the Bunnies, Roosters and Broncos, and all stand out for the same reason: expectations.
It’s why Saturday’s clash with Parramatta is so vital to their hopes of turning a decent season into a great one. Clint Gutherson, Reagan Campbell-Gillard, Mitch Moses and J’maine Hopgood are all out. The Eels were favourites when the market opened, but are now outsiders.
A win would be transformative for their season and put the Kiwis in the box seat for a finals appearance.
They’re on nine wins, equal to Parra and the Cowboys, two ahead of the Titans, Manly, the Dolphins and the Roosters.
Manly beat the Roosters last weekend, all but putting a line through them for 2023, and the Titans face the Dolphins on Sunday, with whoever loses also likely done.
Warriors coach Andrew Webster. (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
With the spaces above them largely secured, that means five teams into two spots to play post-season football.
Parramatta play three of their direct rivals next up – the Warriors and Titans at home, then a trip to Townsville – and the Cowboys also face Manly, the Eels and then the Gold Coast.
With the Warriors set to host Cronulla and Canberra in Auckland, the expectation levels really kick in. This is three games they should win, back to back, before their third and final bye round.
If Webster’s men are serious about being a different sort of footy side to what they have been over the years, this is where the rubber needs to hit the road.
It’s not just a question of draw, either. There’s a serious tactical side to what the Warriors have been doing, why it has been successful and, ultimately, why it has limited them.
They’re among the ‘cleanest’ teams in the comp, making very few errors and backing their opponents to make plenty of their own. Largely, that works well against bad teams because bad teams are bad for a reason.
It also allows the Warriors to stay in the game and await mistakes, while limiting their energy early on. Against the Bulldogs at home and Cowboys away, they finished stronger, while in a raft of games they have run up the score late.
What they do with the ball is largely pretty uninspiring, but their defence, especially as the set goes on, is exceptional and halts attacking momentum in its tracks. It’s perfect for keeping a game within reach.
The problem comes when the opposition’s defence is halfway good and can dry up what the Wahs do. Twice, this has come with a second factor, the weather, which heavily impacted their losses to the Roosters and Souths.
Where their opposition was able to generate points and then sit on the lead, New Zealand were not. Brisbane, too, halted the flow of points before turning it around.
This is what separates the wheat from the chaff.
Defensive-minded teams can go deep in the regular season but need that extra level of magic to beat the best, the same way that offensively-minded teams generally lose late in the year when elite opposition defences make points harder to come by.
In many ways, the Warriors and the Sharks are two sides of the same coin on this: extremely good at one aspect of the game, but with plenty of room to improve the other.
Often, the attacking plan is to get as close to the line as possible and hope that something happens.
Dallin Watene-Zelezniak is an elite finisher and often turns half chances into points, but after him, Shaun Johnson is their joint second top tryscorer (along with Marcelo Montoya) with six and Wayde Egan and Addin Fonua-Blake are on five.
(Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)
If your plan to beat good teams relies on tries from prop and dummy half burrows from your hooker, then you’ll probably struggle to score enough points.
In 2023, merely being in contention for the top eight might be considered good enough. There’d be no shame in that given how the Warriors have fared over the last few years.
The trouble, as ever, is that once you put yourself in a position to succeed, then the pressure to do so increases. That hasn’t always sat well in Auckland.
Should the Warriors win this weekend, they could set down a real marker for the rest of the year.
Win against Parramatta and they get two direct rivals at home in consecutive weeks afterwards, with a pretty light trot to the end of the year. The top four isn’t out of reach, or at the very least, a home final.
With no Origin representation and their opponents seriously weakened, this is the time to strike. It can be a change in mentality for a club that has often struggled in that area.
This will be a pivotal match in how their season pans out from here: will it be chance gone or let’s gone?
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