Paddy Reuben first glimpsed the New Zealand Warriors in action in 1995, after he and a friend scaled a rail-side fence at Auckland’s long-since-demolished Carlaw Park, clinging on to watch the team play the Canberra Raiders in a warm-up before its inaugural season.
“We had a mean-as view,” the 47-year-old remembers. “But every now and then I had to tell my mate, ‘Hang on bro!’ And the train would come smashing past us.” It was a formative experience – and he’s been clinging on ever since. “It’s been a rollercoaster, I’ll tell you man,” he says.
For the past decade the Warriors have lurched between disappointing and dreadful, and friends used to ask Reuben why he still bothered. Now, with the Warriors third on the National Rugby League (NRL) table and a playoff spot secured under new coach Andrew Webster, those people greet him with opposite sentiments: “‘How about those Warriors?’ It’s like, ‘Yeah man, I told you!’”
The rise of the Warriors comes at a time when New Zealand appears to be souring on men’s rugby union – the game that has for so long dominated as the ‘national sport’. Few countries, according to Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, “identify their nation so strongly” with a single sport as Aotearoa does with rugby union. Yet attendance at domestic matches is in decline as the country re-energises its love of rugby league and its local team, with the first four home games the Warriors’ played in 2023 attracting an average attendance surpassed only by their inaugural season.
Local rugby union franchises have failed to ignite similar excitement. Super Rugby – generally a series of mismatches between the New Zealand and Australian sides, followed most years by a championship win for the Crusaders – has become, in the words of New Zealand sports journalist Mark Reason “arguably the most boring competition in the history of rugby union”.
While in 2023 Warriors often play to 24,000 fans, Auckland’s premier rugby union franchise, the Blues could only muster 12,941 to their quarter-final win over the Waratahs. “The overarching public opinion,” Newshub national correspondent Paddy Gower argued this year “suggests rugby is beginning to lose the narrative, as it faces increasing competition from other sports”.
Fanbase spreads
For Brendan Walsh, 49, the game of rugby union has been “destroyed” by a surfeit of new rules. When the Warriors aren’t playing, he prefers to watch any other NRL game over Super Rugby. Walsh bought his first Warriors’ season ticket in 2013 and by the following year he was painting his face for every game and attending as his alter ego, Rocker Warrior. Yet the object of his devotion only made the playoffs once during that time, in 2018. Against that history, this season has been “just exceptional”.
The recent sell-out crowd in Hamilton, Walsh says, suggests the Warriors’ success is resonating far outside the team’s traditional stronghold of Auckland.
“Some people had never been to a Warriors game before … They were just blown away,” he says. When the Warriors played in Napier earlier in the season, McLean Park sold out for the first time since the All Blacks beat Argentina there in 2014.
By the fourth round of the season Walsh, an air-conditioning draughtsman, knew there was something different about this Warriors team. By the 21st, when talismanic halfback Shaun Johnson slotted a field goal to secure a golden-point victory over the Raiders, that belief had become “total elation”. He remembers the dark days of sharing Mt Smart with just “three or four thousand” others. “To hear 25,000 people singing the Warriors song – I’ve never heard a crowd sing it before – that was just mind-blowing. I was up on my seat; I was jumping around. Everyone was.”
‘Helps the spirit’
Ojay Leef, 41, sitting in the dining room of his Manurewa home, remembers the last three minutes of that game as a kaleidoscope of emotion. “There was anger, there was fear, all the emotions were in that last bloody three minutes.” And when it was over, there were “just heaps of cuddles” says the manager of a scaffolding company.
His wife, Raena Leef, 40, used to take the kids to the park when the Warriors were playing so her husband’s bad mood following a loss wouldn’t infect the rest of the family. The Warriors, Ojay says, are finally “paying fans back” for those long, difficult years.
Raena, a machine operator, has been dragged into the slipstream of her husband’s passion – away from a rugby background. She says there is a sense of justice to the Warriors’ success this year, after Covid kept the team in Australia, away from family, friends and fans, for much of the past two seasons. That success is reverberating through the community.
“It picks everyone up, it gives us something to look forward to, everybody is talking about it,” she says. “Kids you don’t know talking to you on the street just because you’re wearing a Warriors top.”
As Paddy Reuben says, Mt Smart during a Warriors’ game is like “a big marae and these guys are all my family”.
“Things may be tough,” he says, “with inflation, the cost of living, petrol just gone up to three dollars a litre. But we are still faithful, we’re still rocking, and it just helps the spirit.”
