Flying Kiwis will keep you up to date on the endeavours of New Zealand sports folk overseas. Not the battlers, mind you, but the genuine overlooked and underappreciated superstars that for some ridiculous reason don’t get a look in on local media.

Chris Wood – Leicester City (English Championship)

& Tommy Smith – Ipswich Town (English Championship)

Yep, these two get lumped together this week, as they found themselves on opposite sides of the field Sunday morning, with LCFC hosting Ipswich. Woody started on the bench, while Smith played the full 90, though it was the Leicester striker who got the best of things on the day, coming on with 20 mins to play after a pair of first half goals gave the Foxes the lead and they kept it till the end, with our boy Woody adding a third late on. Wood’s goal was his first since the start of November. It hasn’t quite been the season Wood would have really hoped for, his team are dominating, but he hasn’t made the personal steps forward that he’d have like – largely due to injuries and also squad competition – though this goal will be great for the confidence, and great for his role in the team with Kevin Phillips joining to add some extra goal scoring depth off the bench. Tommy Smith had a decent game, though it’s not one he’ll want to remember. At least he avoided the errors that a couple of his teammates made, leading to goals. The whole thing isn’t great for Ipswich’s playoff hunt, while Leicester City continue to storm ahead of all competitors in the Championship. They’re now 8 points clear of Burnley, who are second. Ipswich drop to 10th, five points of Reading in 6th.

Up Next for Leicester City: Charlton come to town. Sunday morning, 4am (NZT)

Up Next for Ipswich Town: They host Birmingham, also next Sunday morning, same time (NZT)

Winston Reid – West Ham United (English Premier League)

Another 17 minutes off the bench for Reid, as manager Sam Allardyce sticks with the ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ mentality. Reid’s only this month come back from a fairly long layoff after ankle surgery. He’s being slowly integrated back into the team, and despite being the Hammers’ best player for the first few months of the season, Allardyce has declared that Winnie’ll need to stake his claim pretty strongly before he’ll break up the in form James Tomkins/James Collins partnership at centre back. And why would he, really? The early goal that Southampton scored in this most recent game was the first they’d conceded in the Premier League since they lost 3-1 to Newcastle on the 19th of January – 4 consecutive clean sheets. And even despite that early setback, they came back strong to beat a very decent team 3-1. That makes it 5 games unbeaten for the Hammers and 4 straight wins. Quite an incredible resurgence and it has them all the way up to 10th after flirting with relegation most of the first half of the season. It might not be the case in the short term, but there’ll be plenty more Winston Reid in the Premier League in the future. (Speaking of which, we here at The Cache are hearing very strong rumours that West Ham are going to imminently announce that they are in fact the EPL team rumoured to be heading down here for that friendly with the Phoenix. Start saving those dollars, footy fans, they might not be the only team heading our way...)

Up Next: The always dangerous Everton are in store, away, next Sunday morning (NZT)