A sunny afternoon at the Cake Tin right before a Wellington Phoenix A-League game with the telly cameras in full attendance. Forget about the fact that it was also terrifically windy, Wellington being Wellington and all, it’s always a fine sight to get a bit of Premiership footy in a big stadium.
After getting away with the three points despite a sloppy performance last week against Central Coast, the Wellington Phoenix got their quest for a perfect January off to the necessary start one quarter of the way through.
Other than Auckland City and Team Wellington, both of whom have had their own contextual struggles, it’s almost impossible to predict which teams will get crack the semis. Can Hawke’s Bay keep it up over the full campaign? Do Eastern Suburbs have another gear they can reach? Will the Kale Herbert resurgence in the Tron continue?
Burnley have played four times since the last Flying Kiwis, festive football being what it is in England. Also he was about the only one playing last week so there was no Flying Kiwis hence we get to catch it all up now.
The Nix in the second forty-five were a shadow of the team they’d been previously. But they saw it out, they found a way, and the three points they gained here puts them into fourth place with eight games undefeated.
What a spectacle that was. The Wellington Phoenix just absolutely sizzling all over Mark Rudan’s Western United, pumping them 3-1 away and honestly those jokers were lucky it wasn’t 4-0.
It was the final round of Premiership football before the holidays so why not make it nice and festive, right?
What a strike. What an incredible... okay maybe not a flashy glamorous goal but a pretty crucial one from Rebekah Stott, being in the right place at the right time to tap in from extremely close range for the only goal as Melbourne City beat Perth Glory 1-0.
There’s a lot about the Wellington Phoenix’s 2-2 draw with Sydney FC that was also applicable to their 0-0 draw away to Melbourne Victory a week ago. Both were games in which the Nix did enough to win but were relatively satisfied with a draw, this one featured plenty of goals but it also featured the Nix being unable to hold a half-time lead.
What a moment. 82nd minute of the game, Bayern with a healthy 6-1 lead against Werder Bremen, and on comes Sarpreet Singh in place of hat-trick hero Coutinho. His competitive debut for the German giants and yet another steady step in the right direction, just as he’s done ever since he signed for this club.
They call it the Gridlock Derby. Presumably because of the whole disaster that is Auckland traffic, in the same vein as El Traffico in Los Angeles, though the real gridlock as Auckland City hosted Eastern Suburbs in this week’s televised game happened on the pitch at Kiwitea Street.
Clearly they were the best two teams across the entire season. Northern have really come on strong the last couple seasons with an exciting young team full of age-grade internationals while the Pride have been chilling at this elite level for ages now.
It’s a little bit mental to think that, having started the season with four defeats, the Wellington Phoenix could now be feeling frustrated at only taking a point from Melbourne Victory away. But here we are.
This wasn’t even Wilkie’s first hatty of the season either, she scored a treble in a 6-1 win over Ovarense a couple months back and that’s now 10 goals in 10 games for Wilkie, including 6 in her last 4. You love to see it.
Eastern Suburbs versus Team Wellington. Rematch of last season’s grand final. A lot has changed since then for both teams but this was still massive, especially with both teams having dropped a few too many points in recent times and find themselves deep in a very crowded top four hunt.
Nothing special about the way the Nix played here, not at all... and that’s why it was so important. It was a trend of the early stages of the season that the Nix had to work so hard and play so well to get their rewards but here they won a game in which they didn’t even play that well.
No time to rest in the Premiership because we’ve got a couple extra-curricular things to crack into here, two rather significant pieces of midweek news. One is Ricki Herbert stepping back from Hamilton Wanderers and the other is this Southern United ineligible player thing.
That whole must-win Europa League game away to Sporting Lisbon didn’t exactly go as planned, with Ryan Thomas named on the bench and when he was finally subbed in for his second Europa League appearance with eleven minutes remaining the team was already 4-0 down. Which is the way it would stay. So... yeah.
Myer Bevan then extended that lead early in the second half with a cheeky panenka penalty kick (is there any other kind?). They’re always risky but for ACFC it ain’t no thing – this was the fifth penalty they’d been awarded in the last four games so if ya miss one, just gotta wait patiently for the next to come along.
One of the recurring themes of the early days of this season has been a young Wellington Phoenix team struggling to find the rewards for all their hard work. Strikers battling away but not scoring goals. Defenders keeping things tight without a single clean sheet. Single goal defeats in each of the first four games.