Most of you will be looking forward to a Good Friday but here at Island Bay United we are looking forward to a Great Friday with the return of our Men’s 1st team to the pitch at Wakefield at 3:30pm.
We’ve all read Coach James Prosser’s pre-season summary of his settled squad with some exciting new faces to be revealed on the day of the match. It’s hard to imagine the freewheeling action-packed style of the team will have changed much since last season and that style will surely be completely in keeping with the rest of the division.
The 2021 Cap Prem division looks extremely challenging and if there are any obvious easy games, I can’t see them. Firstly there will be six hotly contested local derbies. We will line up against other first teams in Upper Hutt City, Tawa, Wellington United and Stop Out, a proud old club who will be desperate to return to the Central league at first time of asking. In terms of 2nd teams we will match it with Olympic, North Wellington, Lower Hutt City, Miramar and Wests. The Wests team may be a bit of an enigma this year as their second team has largely been drafted in to play for last year’s Cap Prem champions Wainuiomata who lost a bunch of players after they were promoted. Whatever the case, the speed and intensity of the games will be a few notches higher than that experienced last year. “Captain Fantastic” Bryn Hickson Rowden noted there will be far less margin for error in defence this season, going on to say that the pre-season games had illustrated that mistakes would duly be punished.
As the players step onto the pitch on Friday it will be 191 days since last year’s thrilling Capital 1 grand final win. A lot has changed on the NZ football club landscape during that time.
A new National League has been announced with a regional phase that encompasses the Central League. The provincial franchises have been disbanded and four central league club teams, including the Weenix who get automatic entry, will play in a ten team comp culminating in a National League final in late spring. There is a mandated focus on Youth and, for example, in the Central League all teams must now start each game with two U20 players on the pitch. This has led to a flood of U20 players being named in Central League squads, indeed of the 2019 IBU U17 team there are at least 13 players scattered across various squads.
Why is any of this of any import to us? Because these changes may also affect the makeup of the Cap Prem division as young players vie for starts in the Central League but in fact spend most of their time playing in Cap Prem. A good example of this is a young man from the Valley of Houghton, Flynn Crocker. Flynn was produced by the Houghton Valley School football incubator and played his entire junior and youth football career at IBU until last year when he sought out experience at Cap Prem level with North Wellington, who we welcome on Friday. And what a great fist Flynn made of his first Cap Prem season. He was a regular in a very parsimonious North Wellington defence and topped that off by being named in the U17 All Whites training squad. It is heartwarming to see that there is a 3rd pathway to higher honours besides the 2 elite academies. In a candid admission, he shared with me that the minutes he got with the IBU Cap Prem team at the end of the 2019 season, as we slithered down the relegation snake, had set him up nicely for his 2020 season in terms of personal confidence and coping with the pace of the game. Still only a youngster, in year 12 at Rongotai College, Flynn excels in both Futsal and Football and is well on the way to becoming Buckley Road’s 2nd greatest defender of all time.
His personal manager tells me he might not quite make the field on Friday due to a fitness issue but there are plenty more talented youngsters in the North Wellington lineup to take in. Last year the team started well in Cap Prem with their miserly defense, but struggled to score goals. With two thirds of the season completed they found themselves in the drop zone but then began a scarcely believable run where they scored 20 goals in their final 5 games culminating in a last round, away toweling of Cap Prem champions Wainuiomata. If they’d been a racehorse they surely would have been swabbed, but we all know how quickly things can change in the “butterfly effected” world of football.
Of course we of the South Coast are made of stern stuff and we all saw last year in the final how the gnarly old Sharks (average age 23) were able to unsettle and overpower the Nix wunderkind with a steely combination of skill, brute force and ribald sea shanties sung in high pitch at halftime. Friday will be an excellent if early test of our game and how it stacks up against a typically young, energetic and skilled side.
It even looks like we might sneak the game through before the next Southerly arrives, I can’t wait and I hope to see you there!
