New Zealand and Tonga the leaders after day one

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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 But that view could be outdated.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 So again, maybe we're a bit out of date.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.

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Brett Northey - Co-founder and Chief Editor of WFN

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Brett Northey - Co-founder and Chief Editor of WFN

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