A good kind of crazy for Gisborne Thistle

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Gisborne Thistle must be crazy if they think they can travel to Palmerston North, play on unfamiliar artificial turf and take at least a share of the points from the second-placed team in the league.

That’d be a good kind of crazy, mind.

Sports teams do it all the time . . . build themselves up to perform for 80 or 90 minutes in a state of suspended reality, believing they have a chance of winning when any sane person could tell them they haven’t a hope.

Some call it belief, others fantasy, but sport would be reduced to a predictable calculation of skill and form without it.

And with “it”, you get the interesting bits — heart, imagination, tactics — that lift sport into the realms of theatre for the masses.

ALH Gisborne Thistle trail the rest of the field in the eight-team Central Federation League. At 2.45pm tomorrow they play second-placed Palmerston North Marist on the Arena Turf in Palmerston North in their last league game of the year.

When these teams met in Gisborne in June, Marist won 2-0 but needed two outstanding strikes to pull off the victory.

A 40-metre wonder goal from the league’s top scorer, Melvin Rumere, and a classy piece of opportunism from Nick Carrick gave Marist the win on that occasion. Rumere has 14 goals so far in this year’s league, while Carrick is equal-fourth in the golden boot competition with seven.

Brazilian coach Juliano Schmeling had learned from cruel experience the previous year that the Gisborne trip demanded special measures.

Last year, Marist had suffered through having only one substitute for the Gisborne trip. They conceded three goals in stoppage time and lost to the Jags 5-2.

This year Schmeling decided they would travel on the day of the game so he could include players who wouldn’t have been able to travel on Friday.

They left Palmerston North at 6am in a van and a car and arrived around 12, having stopped to eat on the way.

Marist had three subs, and used them all.

Thistle had two of their best attacking players — Cullen Spawforth and Jarom Brouwer — unavailable for that June game.

Tomorrow, Spawforth is available but Brouwer is not; he has work commitments, and so has Matt McVey (they’re in the police). Holding midfielder Kieran Venema is suspended after being sent off last week.

So it’s backs to the wall — a good starting point for any last stand.

And if the coach has a plan, and it’s a good one and the players buy into it, and they’re not playing Manchester City or Liverpool . . . well, anything is possible.

Garrett Blair will have a plan — his grandfather was Henry Cudd, his mother, aunts and uncles grew up steeped in football, and so did he — he’ll have a plan, and it might be good.

Tomorrow he will ask his players to believe.

The Jags and Levin are on the same number of points — four — but Levin have a goal difference that is one goal better than Thistle’s. So even if both bottom teams lose tomorrow, the margin of those losses will be critical.