NRL: Minor title major boost for Fien

Nathan Fien helped the Dragons to a convincing win over the Warriors in just his second game for his new club in July. Photo / Getty Images

It is with some irony that Nathan Fien is playing finals football while his former Warriors team-mates contemplate the finality of a disappointing season.

Fien wasn't wanted by the Warriors and suffered the ignominy of playing out the last six weeks of his time there with the Auckland Vulcans.

What made it worse was that within 10 days, he went from starting the Anzac test against Australia to being relegated to the NSW Cup.

He was good enough for his (adopted) country but not good enough for his club.

Fien has not only found another home, but one at the NRL's top side.

What seemed a season to forget is now one to treasure. The Dragons have won the minor premiership and are the bookies' favourites to win the title.

"To come over to the Dragons 10 weeks ago has been a fantastic move for me," Fien enthuses. He's not wrong.

Fien has an avid supporter in Dragons coach Wayne Bennett, who was Kiwis assistant at last year's World Cup.

Bennett rang Fien on June 30, the last day players could register with a new club, and asked if he wanted to come over early.

It wasn't a difficult decision and the only thing needed was a release from the Warriors.

The 30-year-old had already signed a three-year deal to join the Dragons from 2010. Bennett just wanted him for the remainder of 2009 as well.

"In the end, I had to take a pay cut to get over here," he says, "but I just wanted to play. I was happy to come over.

"The ride over the last 10 weeks has been tremendous, culminating in winning the minor premiership. It's a fantastic achievement for the club and one I'm very proud to be a part of. I definitely consider myself a Dragon now and I feel very comfortable in the red V."

Fien had felt comfortable in Auckland, too. He wanted to stay but the Warriors had indicated in 2008 there wasn't a future for him when his contract expired at the end of 2009.

He looked around for a new deal and had a chance to join Huddersfield but turned it down because of changes to the British tax rules.

That was when the Dragons pounced. It was also about the time when the Warriors relegated him to the Vulcans.

"I was going to try to force my way back into the first-grade side at the Warriors," Fien says.

"Two weeks earlier, I was starting for New Zealand in a test and then I couldn't even make the 17 at the Warriors. I was a little bit disappointed.

"I was still very confident I could do a job for the club and force my way back in but, as it panned out, I really wasn't given a look in. The final straw was when the Warriors went on the Queensland tour to play the Broncos and Titans in consecutive weeks and they took 20 players away - and not only couldn't I make the 17 but I wasn't even in the top 20 players. That made me ask questions about how much first-grade football I was going to play there.

"I still had aspirations of playing for the Kiwis [in the Four Nations] at the end of the year and it would have been very hard to earn selection playing for the Vulcans. I have heard that [former director of football] John Hart said I was asking for phenomenal money, which was not true at all.

"I have no ill feelings towards the club. I have been around long enough to know this sort of stuff goes on. Recruitment and planning is very important. Whether those decisions they made are 100 per cent right, I don't know. But maybe the results speak for themselves."

Fien, of course, wasn't the only one deemed surplus to requirements, as Michael Witt (Otago rugby) and Grant Rovelli (Cowboys) were both shunted out of the Warriors.

Fien's one regret is that his last game for the Warriors was a largely forgettable 34-12 loss to the Cowboys at Mt Smart Stadium when Johnathan Thurston ran amok. Fien scored a try playing at five-eighth but it was after this match that coach Ivan Cleary decided Fien and Stacey Jones couldn't play together. Something had to give and that was Fien.

"I really wanted to play first grade again because I didn't want that Cowboys game, when we got convincingly beaten, to be how I remembered playing for the Warriors.

"It was what was driving me when I was playing with the Vulcans. Unfortunately, that's the way it turned out.

"But I am really enjoying everything about being here [at the Dragons]. Every morning, I wake up and I look forward to training and learning little things off Wayne. He's been a great help for me. I'm like a little kid again. It's really rejuvenated me in the sense that I'm excited about footy, training and being around the boys."

A minor premiership can have that effect on a player. Fien joined the Dragons midway through a seven-game winning streak - as fate would have it, his second game was against the Warriors at Mt Smart Stadium, which they won 29-4 - and their 37-0 rout of the previously red-hot Eels last weekend turned around three-straight defeats.

They tackle the Eels again today in the first round of playoffs. A win will earn a week off and leave them only one game away from a grand final.

"We can't look too far ahead," Fien cautions. "We have won the minor premiership, which is fantastic, but at the start of the year players don't want to win the minor premiership, they want to be there on grand final night and win that. It's a whole new competition now with eight quality teams and it starts all over again. Anyone can win it.

"We have Parramatta again. I was a part of the Warriors last year when we beat Melbourne in Melbourne [in the first weekend of the playoffs], so anything is possible."

How those same players might love to trade places with Fien now.