A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
Gisborne Thistle had the second-best scoring record in Central Football’s Federation League, and the worst defensive record. Their goals for couldn’t keep pace with their goals against and so they finished second-last in a five-team competition.
That’s one way to sum up ALH Gisborne Thistle’s 2023 season.
Another way is to look at:
• Their commitment to playing at the highest level open to them.
• The audacity of their offer to play all eight of their away games before their first home fixture to ensure the league went ahead with them in it.
• The grit shown by players, coaches and administrators to ensure they lived up to their end of the bargain.
Thistle had by far the most onerous and costly travel burden in the league, yet they met every requirement made of them. Postponements were because of weather, cup scheduling conflicts or Covid outbreaks. Thistle did not default any games.
But it is hard to argue with coach Garrett Blair’s summary of the season as “messy”.
“I think as a whole it was messy, and it was for a lot of reasons,” he said. “The boys did exceptionally well but if you are a results person you will only look at the results. In a lot of games, luck was not on our side.”
He listed incidents that went against Thistle but could have gone the other way: striker Jimmy Somerton’s disallowed headed goal against Taradale in the 2-2 draw at Childers Road Reserve; the 1-1 away draw with Napier City Rovers Reserves when Thistle scored in injury time and City Rovers equalised with less than a minute to go; and the away game with Taradale when a 90th-minute penalty consigned the Jags to a 4-3 loss.
“Those results could have gone either way,” Blair said.
“I feel if they’d gone our way, we’d have been sitting in a better position on the table.”
He said the 6-1 away loss to eventual champions Palmerston North Marist and the 7-2 home loss to City Rovers Reserves were the only games where Thistle “weren’t in it”.
In Somerton, Thistle had the league’s golden boot (highest scorer). His total of 21 league goals was well ahead of the next best effort. And skipper Mitchell Stewart-Hill was one of the best goalkeepers in the league. But injuries, suspensions and competing commitments sometimes tipped the scales in their opponents’ favour. Then again, sometimes they just weren’t good enough.
Blair said he was “extremely proud of the boys’ resilience and commitment”.
“As a group we went through something that no other team will go through . . . playing all our away games first, travelling by different means. The rigmarole we went through to play at the level we did was character-building.”
He said the team were a good unit, and he hoped they’d stay together.
“We set out to create something that was a bit different . . . not necessarily everyone’s flavour. We wanted to be as professional as possible, and we wanted the players to feel like they were in a professional environment. We made significant steps towards that, and I hope it continues.”
Asked about his plans for next season, Blair said: “I probably won’t be overseeing the first team.”
He had yet to debrief club chairman Shannon Dowsing or the commitee on the season, but Dowsing had told him the committee wanted to go in a different direction. It seemed clear to Blair that he wouldn’t be first-team coach on that journey.
“Coaching at this level is where I want to be,” he said.
“At the moment the region has only one team at that aspirational level, although that’s not to say another club couldn’t start that process. I haven’t had any conversations with anyone regarding options . . . I’ve been focusing on the past four weeks.”
Blair hoped the club would retain the pathway that had been created for player development.
“In my opinion, anything other than that top league would be a backward step,” he said.
Player recruitment and retention were important. English imports Hugo Elwood and Ryan Noon were exceptional players, and the team needed the mix of local talent and outside experience that was possible when players of their calibre were available.
Asked about Blair’s future with the club, Dowsing said he hadn’t had a “sit-down” with Blair yet and wouldn’t be comfortable talking about it at this stage.
Thistle had a policy of advertising all of the coaching roles each year, and the club would advertise for a head coach as part of that.
“We will be announcing our new strategy at our AGM (annual general meeting) in October,” he said.
The strategy would include a lot more operational functions, and plans on how to foster more participation in the club and in football in general.
The Federation League hadn’t met its own requirements for competition structure this year, Dowsing said.
“It’s supposed to be a minimum of six teams. We would prefer to be playing in a league with 10 teams. It’s not a competition format that is conducive to developing our players. We’re hoping that greater participation in the league in future will sort that out.
“That’s the league we currently have available to us as members of Central Football. While we’ve competed at Pacific Premiership level, that tends to have a Gisborne team at the top. When we were in that league we wanted to compete in the league above.
“I hope it becomes an opportunity for Central Football to look at how they can provide a level of football and a league that are more competitive across more regions and divisions.”