Sports After Dark

In a city where rugby is king and the Sevens is a two day party, there is a new sport in town: football. And despite some shaky beginnings, Wellington is embracing the Beautiful Game.

OK, I admit it, I was a Kingz fan back in the early days of the franchise, but after watching them lose game after game in the dying minutes, I gave up on New Zealand’s only professional football team. Luckily that meant I missed the disaster that was the New Zealand Knights; a franchise with little success on the field and none off it.

Now New Zealand has a new professional football team in a new city: the Wellington Phoenix. Unlike their Auckland based predecessors, the Phoenix have a competent management and a good base of players.

But that doesn’t make the life of a fan any simpler. Nobody expects the Phoenix to win the competition in their first year, in fact the other seven clubs have two seasons of A-League experience.

There was a time when the Phoenix defence was horribly brittle, threatening to collapse at any moment and unleash an avalanche of goals. Often it was only the brilliant play of goal keeper Glenn Moss which kept the Phoenix from suffering humiliating defeats.

The release of Brazilian defender Cleberson and the addition of Australian defender Kristian Rees, along with a change in formation, seems to have shored up the Phoenix defence for the time being, but now their problem is at the other end of the field.

In the past two weeks the Phoenix’s opponents have been forced to play with only 10 men for a good chunk of the game, but the Phoenix failed to capitalise. In fact in their last home outing against Sydney they were ahead when Tony Popovic was sent off, only to concede a penalty in injury time and come away with a 1-1 draw.

Their last outing against Melbourne showed that this team does have fighting spirit. Despite having a numerical advantage after Kevin Muscat was sent off after 35 minutes, the Phoenix conceded an unlucky goal and went into the break down 1-0.

The Phoenix pulled level thanks to a goal from former Melbourne player Vince Lia early in the second half, but were unable to get their noses in front. In injury time, Brazilian import Felipe found himself in a prime position to score, but instead of pulling the trigger, he laid the ball off, seemingly deaf to my pleas to shoot.

On field performances aside, this is a team on the rise. There have been numerous off field successes, including the signings of top Australian talent Ross Aloisi and Ahamd Elrich, but perhaps the biggest coup achieved by club management is bringing David Beckham and his LA Galaxy to Wellington for an exhibition match.

Beckham-mania swept into Sydney recently as the Galaxy played their mid-week game against Sydney FC in front of a sell out 80,000 fans, most of whom came to see just one man. Can this feat be repeated in Wellington?  The answer, apparently, is yes. Not only is the game against the Galaxy looking like a sell out on Sunday, but the A-League game against Adelaide on Friday night will attract the biggest crowd ever to an A-League game. Not a bad effort for in a rugby mad city.

With the off-field successes this young club has had, it seems likely that on-field success is only a matter of time. The danger the club faces is, without on-field success casual football fans will simply dismiss the team and go back to the other sporting codes on offer, but as more and more Kiwis look for an alternative to rugby, it would seem that the Phoenix are providing a good one in Wellington.

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• What has Beckham-mania done for New Zealand football?
• Things that bug me about football
• Late Petrovski winner extinguishes Phoenix hopes
• Jets douse Phoenix for comfortable home win

The Watch out Hurricanes! Here come the Phoenix. by Hamish McBrearty, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.