Midweek Fixture: Warriors need a new everything, including a home

Shaun Johnson looks a bit bummed out against manly. Thousands are not there to witness it. Photo / Getty Images

By Dylan Cleaver

These are forlorn days out Penrose way, where the home part of the season ended, appropriately enough, with their 53rd loss in a row.

At least that's what it feels like.

The Warriors problems are myriad and include a sale process that looks like it was drawn up on the back of a beer mat at 3am.

They include whole bunch of players on the books who are below first-grade standard and few on the horizon to pin hopes upon.

Their recruitment is hamstrung by the 2200km wide strip of water that separates them from the league heartlands of Sydney and Brisbane. As such they overpay for veterans looking for a last decent contract (Ryan Hoffman), or take a punt on unproven talent who, if they play well enough, will cut and run as soon as the next Sydney club comes calling (James Maloney and Chad Townsend).

No Australian in their early prime wants to play at the Warriors. Fact. The Warriors have been poor at transitioning decent juniors into first-grade stars. Another sad fact. Even their best players, their internationals, have well-documented flaws. Add those three facts together and you have a failsafe recipe for 13th.

This is a grim picture, but it gets worse: the Warriors, version 2017, are joy-sappingly boring. Memories of the Warriors being inconsistent but exciting are long gone. They're paint-by-numbers; they're a Round Wine instead of a Tim Tam.

They're in the bottom four in points scored, bottom five in tries, bottom seven in linebreaks and bottom three in offloads. They kick the ball more than any other team and make bugger-all errors - only Manly have made fewer - which just goes to show how fatuous the whole completed-sets stats craze is.

To summarise their on-field efforts you could say they're talent deficient, tedious and... ordinary.

But the squad and coaching is not even the area that is in most acute need of addressing.
For as long as they pitch their tent at Mt Smart they are doomed to indifference. The average Warriors crowd this year will come in a tick under 12,000. This is an unscientific observation but there must be about 8000 diehard Warriors fans who miss games only through illness or family bereavement.

The club has 17,800 members, give or take a train carriage or two.

So there are a lot of casual fans who just won't go to Mt Smart. Don't blame them for a minute.

The field is fine, the views are fine, the stands are functional enough. The in-stadium match-day experience is among the best in the NRL, apparently.

That's the good.

The stadium sits in a crater in a soulless industrial wasteland. Unless you're a student of panel shops there is nothing of interest within a 2km radius of the ground.

Those occasional sunny Sunday arvos when you think an afternoon of footy would hit the spot for the family as long as you can combine it with a nice lunch and a refreshing beverage at a nearby atmospheric pub. Mt Smart has the footy part of the equation covered, nothing else.

(Eden Park gets a lot of deserved flak and the in-stadium experience there is generally abysmal, but it does have Kingsland.)

Friday night footy? You could try negotiating your way from the CBD to Penrose and then back home after, or then again you can have a couple of drinks at work and watch it from home or the pub. You can guess what most people choose.

Saturdays might work, but the Warriors played just one home game in 2017 on the seventh day, a resounding win against Brisbane that saw 14,000 turn up.

With a bag full of issues, you might think stadium shortcomings are low down on the list of priorities for any potential new Warriors' owner/s. On the contrary, they should be integral.

If you had the money to buy a professional sports franchise, which is in itself the ultimate vanity project, then you'd be wanting a guarantee that a move to a new central city stadium was part of the package.

The failing Warriors need a complete overhaul. Winning days do not look like they are just around the corner. A new home that will help re-engage the casual fan should be the centrepiece of any transformation.

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A random collection of thoughts from the weekend's instant classic.

1. This was not a great leap forward for the Wallabies that people are suggesting.

2. It was, however, a great leap forward for the idea that there are more possibilities for outlier results in rugby than there used to be.

3. And a Wallabies victory would have been an outlier in many different ways. The All Blacks dominated possession, they dominated the penalty count, they dominated metres made, defenders beaten, the setpiece and many other facets including, perhaps surprisingly, goalkicking.

4. You present these sorts of statistics to the All Blacks and eight times out of 10 they win that test by 15-20 points.

5. That the Wallabies got that close was down to a telegraphed intercept pass from Damian McKenzie and a number of inexplicable defensive misreads, with Aaron Smith and Kane Hames chief among the culprits.

6. Which is all part of test rugby's rich fabric and why we love the game, and of course the Wallabies had to be good enough to exploit these ominously frequent All Black defensive conniptions but I couldn't help but pfffft-ing at the idea Australia have gone some way to bridging the gulf in class.

7. And it is a bit rich to hear Cheika talk about decisions not going their way making their lives harder. Yep, on another day Retallick may have seen a card for his tip at a breakdown but on another day also his ruled-out try might have stood.

8. And I'm still not sure how Wallaby blindside Ned Hanigan avoided a yellow card and a penalty try when he came back through the line offside when the ball was headed to Rieko Ioane with the line open.

9. Beauden Barrett is a genius and along with Retallick was the most influential player on the field on Saturday but I'm not sure they want him forced to make as many tackles per game (9) as he is at the moment.

THE WEEK IN MEDIA...

I'm told the writer of this magnificent error eventually got over it... with a little help from his friends.

You have to hand it to the best American sportswriters, they know how to report the heck out of tragedy. From Bleacher Report.