New Zealand and Tonga the leaders after day one

Welcome to World Footy News Monday, May 26 2025 @ 01:08 pm ACST

New Zealand and Tonga the leaders after day one | 2 comments | Create New Account

The following comments are owned by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.

This site requires you to be logged in to post a comment. If you have an account already (or need to create one), please login here.

New Zealand and Tonga the leaders after day one

Authored by: Mister Football
on Saturday, December 12 2009 @ 09:47 pm ACDT

That Tonga defeat of Nauru by 6 goals is a bit of an eye opener. I would never have predicted a result like that.

No one has been talking up Tonga at all - what's their story?

---
Mister Football

---
Mister Football

New Zealand and Tonga the leaders after day one

Authored by: Brett Northey
on Sunday, December 13 2009 @ 12:18 am ACDT

We used to follow them (Tonga) quite closely, and they had some good junior programs. But I suspected they had yet to get enough people on the ground driving the program year in and year out, with continuity, to take it to the next level. But that view could be outdated.

And unfortunately here at WFN we don't have enough volunteers either, so we have no specific Tonga, Samoa, Fiji reporter, so we publish things when they fall in our lap, but we don't have the resources to hunt down stories on those countries as often as we'd like. So again, maybe we're a bit out of date. We have reported a few good things on Tonga this year if you search back.

Perhaps we expect too much from Nauru too. They just about lost footy there for a few years, so I suspect most of their kids are mostly in their first proper season.

Even NZ is much less formal at junior level. The Hawks Cup is now giving regularly competition for kids, but that is very recent.

So a lot of these countries are on an upward swing, but only a very recent one. I would've expected PNG to be the one with more juniors in regular programs over a longer period. I suspect they would've been far too good for the others, except perhaps not having the range of bigger bodies might have closed the gap. We won't know this year.

The big match of day two is the first - NZ vs Tonga, the winner likely to be overall champ. Tonga vs Samoa should be tough too - traditional rivals in everything (going right back to raiding each others islands!).

But yeah, looking at those scores, Tonga would have to be a really good chance to cause an upset.

---
Brett Northey - Co-founder and Chief Editor of WFN

---
Brett Northey - Co-founder and Chief Editor of WFN

RSS news	RSS events
Twitter	Facebook

World Footy News

Search

Translate

User Functions

Events

Featured Sites

Older Stories

Friday 21-Mar

Thursday 06-Mar

Wednesday 05-Feb

Tuesday 04-Feb

Saturday 14-Dec

Friday 13-Dec

Socials

Who's Online

Random Image

What's New

Articles last 2 weeks

Comments last 2 weeks

Links last 2 weeks

Advertisements