LEAGUE - Saints may help inmates score in the game of life

Having a team full of convicted criminals at Ngawha Prison join the local rugby league competition this season polarised opinions. But when Advocate rugby league reporter Peter Thorley went inside the walls at Ngawha he found inmates humbled by the opportunity to taste life on the outside ...
On first sight Alfred "Ace" Tuakana looks like an ordinary league player but to his fellow inmates at Ngawha Prison he is a genius.
It was Tuakana who first came up with the idea for the prison to have its own rugby league team. He and Richard Lasike fronted up to the media this week to explain their passion for the game.
"We're just normal people who have made mistakes. We want to change and we have changed," Tuakana said.
"And I think that playing rugby league here has already helped us a lot," Lasike added.
The pair were chosen to front up to the media because they are special cases, model prisoners, as their coach, prison warden Joe Henare, might say.
Tuakana, 31, and Lasike, 24, are "flatmates" in the internal self-care facility at the prison; secure apartment-like units inside the prison walls but separate from the main cellblocks. They spend Monday to Friday working in a forestry gang outside the prison, buy their own groceries, cook their own meals and attend Saints training, work permitting.
"There's a feeling of normality in self-care, it's like being at home a bit, you go to work then go to league training but you're still inside the walls at night," Lasike said.
"And on Saturday we travel to the game ... just over there," Tuakana cut in laughing, pointing to the rugby field less than 20m from his unit.
"That's the whole idea of it, to try and put some normality back in their day-to-day routines before they go back out into society," Henare said.
And that's the philosophy in a nutshell, these guys are trying to put their past behind them - and once they leave prison for good they don't want to come back.
Tuakana has been in the self-care facility for almost 18 months and Lasike almost a year, meaning they have kept their noses out of trouble at the prison for a lot longer than that during their stretch. In Ngawha, the highlight of the week is the big match on Saturday.
Lasike, from Auckland, hopes that playing sport on the outside will help keep him out of trouble. He has already identified East Coast Bays as the club he hopes to join.
"I hadn't played sports since I left school but I decided in here to get fit again and go out and play when I get out. I know I can go to a club and that can ease me back into the game," he said.
Henare said his players found innovative ways to train and had been known to bench press each other. Fitness and tough defence are the cornerstone of his coaching regime. It is a no-nonsense approach, there have been two broken legs in sickbay already this season.
A former Hikurangi Stag, Tuakana said the idea to start the Saints team was one of the best he had ever had. "For me, it's an honour to have all the best rugby league players in Northland coming here to play us, it's an honour to play against them," he said.
* Saints' coach expects Bulls to charge in
Ngawha Saints coach Joe Henare won't be taking Northern Wairoa Bulls lightly when they visit the prison tomorrow.
The difference between the two teams is six points on the table, with the Saints in third and the Bulls second from the bottom, but Henare says in this year's competition that may not mean too much.
"The gap between the top and bottom teams this season is a lot closer than it was last year and everyone is a threat," he said.
"Northern Wairoa could be one of the dark horses of the competition. They play a pretty good game and I'm picking them to knock over one of the top teams if they let their guard down," he said.
Henare, who played for Kaikohe Lions last year before taking over the prison team this season, said some of the cricket scores that appeared in the first round of the competition last year just weren't showing up this year.
Ngawha are coming off one of their best performances of the season last week, when they kept defending champions Moerewa scoreless, beating them 16-0.
Moerewa were guilty of forcing too many passes on the boggy Ngawha ground and the Bulls are unlikely to make the same mistake this week, against a solid defensive unit that has scored a number of long-range tries from turnovers this season.
There are three other matches tomorrow in the eighth and penultimate round of the first round robin. Portland will be marginally favoured to beat Moerewa at home but, after both clubs struggled through tough matches last week, the result may hang on whichever team is less injury ravaged.
Fourth-placed Kaikohe Lions host sixth-placed Hikurangi in another match that is impossible to pick, while Bay Slayers host Marist in a lower table clash that offers both teams a chance of some upward movement. Competition leaders Takahiwai will remain on top of the table after the weekend with the bye.