KEY POINTS:
New Zealand Warrior Brent Tate expects to have a little extra to look out for when he marks Manly's Steve Matai in the National Rugby League (NRL) preliminary final on Saturday night.
The clash of the two international centres is one of the feature match-ups at the Sydney Football Stadium, with Kangaroo Tate showing plenty of pre-match respect for his Kiwi opponent.
"He's such a tough competitor and he doesn't do anything by halves," he said.
"He's probably one of the most physical centres you'll play against. I just remember tackling him when we played Manly here thinking how hard he runs the ball and how strong he is."
Tate said Matai had added another string to his bow and that made him an even more difficult opponent to contain.
"The great thing about Steve is he has brought a lot more to his game this year with his footwork," he said.
"He is starting to score a lot of tries with his footwork and his speed."
Tate himself has had a more than decent first year with the Warriors, after seven seasons and a premiership ring with Brisbane.
The Queensland State of Origin representative heads the club's statistics in offloads (36) and with runs with the ball (337), and is near the top in other categories.
Although he didn't feel he had quite got his zip back after returning from a knee injury at the start of the season, he made the shortlist for Warriors' player of the year, an accolade that went for second rower Simon Mannering.
Tate confessed that, midway through the year, he didn't believe the then-struggling Warriors would get to their present situation of being one match away from a grand final appearance.
"But to the guys' credit, we've really rallied and we're a pretty close-knit group," he said.
"We've dug deep and we've put ourselves in a really good position."
With four victories in a row and 10 in their past 12 matches, the Warriors had managed to build vital momentum at the right time of the campaign, Tate said.
"You have to be winning games going into the finals and we've been lucky to do that," he said.
"We're a team that, when we're having fun, we're dangerous, and we've been doing that the past few weeks."
The year has been a big for Tate off the field as well, with the birth of his first child, son Kyden.
He said being a father had helped him to get away from the hype associated of football.
There was also a new perspective when he watched former club Brisbane go down in a gut-wrenching last-minute 16-14 defeat to Melbourne last weekend.
It was "a horrible way" to get eliminated and he had never seen Brisbane skipper Darren Lockyer as cut up as he was immediately after the Storm's Greg Inglis scored the killer try.
However, despite his length of service with the Broncos, Tate didn't feel any additional emotion himself about the result.
"No, that's a part of my life that's over now," he said.
"I'm 100 per cent a Warrior now. The only concern I've got is how we're going."
- NZPA
