- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Before spending millions on risky expansions or selling State of Origin matches offshore, the NRL would be better served making use of the low hanging fruit ripe for the plucking by giving the Warriors the attention they deserve.
If you are a New Zealand-based Warriors supporter, you get used to poor media service. Besides limited locally produced content (which is generally woeful) in the Land of the Long White Cloud, we only get Fox League’s NRL coverage.
Via that, Warriors supporters get used to a thin gruel of analysis of their team. Although in saying that, sometimes you would rather have silence than the patronising references you do often get when the Wahs are occasionally mentioned.
Now, some might explain this dearth of Warriors coverage on them being such serial under-performers. However, the coverage this year of St George Illawarra, Canterbury and the Wests Tigers belies that. Those franchises have been terrible all season but have got as many column inches as anyone.
In contrast to those three train wrecks, the Warriors unusually are travelling well this year.
There is serious talk of both their coach and playmaker being acknowledged as the best in the game by winning the Dally M.
So, they are for once ripe for some coverage beyond the usual occasional ‘they are no good again this year’ aside.
It is also not like they don’t have their fair share of dramas to cover if you are looking for something spicier.
One only has to take the quickest of looks at the Warrior’s current ownership (or talk to Matt Lodge) to see a mountain of potential for hilarious content waiting to be milked.
Some more macro-economically minded might say, hey, while technically the league media are supposed to cover the competition in its entirety, the money and fans are largely Australian so that is where the coverage epicentre must be.
That is fair enough in terms of the New Zealand-based fans but that is not what the NRL and its media should be looking to do.
On the assumption that the NZ media can cater for their league supporters (which it can’t but that’s a story for another day), let us just consider the Australian media market.
There are about 600,000 NZ-born folks resident in the Lucky Country (lucky to have so many Kiwis?). About 2% of the Australian population.
Firstly, as everyone knows, Kiwis do not know the first thing and have no interest in AFL. They consider it ridiculous and are frankly perplexed that anyone could watch it. This Australian-based cohort are therefore likely to be more loyal to oval-ball games that do not involve punching it upfield.
More subtly, as anyone who has lived overseas for a while knows, of that cohort, the vast majority will have a far higher level of interest in, and engagement with, Warriors stories than if they were at home.
When you are away from your home jingoism jingles and jangles louder, which means you digest news of any kind from home far more veraciously than you would if still on home soil.
Given this, is it unrealistic to say that of those 600,000 expat Kiwis, the intense engagement levels would be at 80% of them.
(Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)
Now if one uses the NRL final as one highwater mark for NRL engagement, the 2022 Grand final was watched by about 2.37 million viewers.
If you stack up say 450,000 Kiwis who would be taking an active interest in NZ league stories all season that suggests that there is at least a possibility that Kiwis in Australia could be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, Australian based fan block the NRL has. So why does one not get that impression when one watches Aussie NRL media content.
When the game is in a constant existential battle for market share it seems bizarre to think it is missing the trick sitting right under its nose.
Unlike other options, developing this market would not require lots of risk. Before you look at this an extra NZ team or having NZ host a State of Origin you make sure you are making the most of what you have already because it is so much cheaper and less risky to do.
How about just hiring some NZ-based freelancers to do the odd written piece or film some vision from Aotearoa to use on the other side of the Tasman.
That low-cost gambit would also have the substantial collateral benefit of providing the skinny NZ league media market some critical mass to better service the domestic market.
So come on NRL, Nine and Fox, don’t be Johnny come-Latelys and wait until the Grand Final week to get on the Wah-train. Get on ‘em hard now and win some classy new fans.
Saturday’s semi-final in Auckland is not only the culmination of the Warriors’ fairytale run but Newcastle are riding high on the back of a 10-game winning streak.
Even though the Panthers gave the Warriors a serious mauling when Nathan Cleary put on a masteclass last Saturday, it is not all doom and gloom here on the better side of the Tasman.
Any cunning coach, and let us be very clear, Sir Andrew Webster is cunning as an out-house rat, would have started planning afresh once the regular season ended and mapped a bespoke battle plan for getting his underpowered team to the grand final.
Marata Niukore scores a try as he is tackled by Will Kennedy. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)
In working out a way to win these moments Sir Andrew would have first taken stock of the damage levels on his big guns, particularly his biggest and creakiest, Shaun Johnson.
He would have judged how many top-flight minutes he would get out of Johnson and concluded it was less than the 160 required to play Penrith and, if they lost to the Panthers, this week’s game at home.
Sir Andrew also knows Penrith like the back of his hand. He would have picked early that it was a huge ask to go to their home and win in front of that rabid crowd. He would have also seen late in the game-week how the Broncos turned the Storm “putrid.”
Knowing the Panther DNA as he does, he would have concluded that would only throw more petrol on the already on fire Panthers and thought about winning the war not the battle.
So why Sir Andrew and the Warriors can never say so, it seems that they never seriously thought that they would beat a path to the grand final kicking down the Panthers’ door. Rather, he would have figured the best way for the Wahs to extend their run was to make sure their biggest playing assets were as well tuned as they could be for the game they have the best chance of winning; the one this Saturday after Johnson gets an extra week of recovery and in front of the 25,000 man/woman and spider-person strong Wahmy at home in Auckland.
While it is tempting fate to say at a volume louder than a wink that Sir Andrew was always planning to lay a Ponga trap at Mt Smart this weekend, he absolutely was.
All will be revealed on Saturday. It is captivatingly uncertain whether Ponga and co will be return home with a Preliminary Final berth or a lump of coal home for their Christmas stockings.
However, whatever the outcome we can confidently say it will be a Wah-mazing to have finals footy back in Auckland on Saturday.
Reckon you can pick the winning team? Build your own dream team with Draftstars daily fantasy and compete on any match. For great odds on the NRL head on over to PlayUp. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.