Player-coach Jason Walters says that record will probably mean they will be expected to go into Division 1. He thinks they will be up for the challenge.
“I believe we deserve a shot anyway,” he said.
“We’ve served our apprenticeship; we’ve come through the grades.”
A second Wairoa Athletic team would need to enter the Gisborne competition to make a Division 1 team work, Walters said.
“I had 32 people on the books this year, and I needed that many because sometimes it was hard to get 15 for game day.
“That’s just the nature of Wairoa. People come and go depending on work and opportunities.
“We need a second team if we go up, so we can draw on them for substitutes. We couldn’t carry the numbers we need to run a Division 1 team and not give them a game.”
In the past few years, Wairoa have drawn on Gisborne-based players to boost their strength, and Walters — a Wairoa player for eight years and coach for five of those — is one of them.
“I’d like half a dozen Gisborne guys to bolster our strength for next year,” he said.
“I’ve already started shopping.”
The logistics could be a challenge — it would help if both Wairoa teams were in the same town on game days — but it was also exciting, he said.
This year’s title rested on the last game, but much of the drama came before the match.
Wairoa have had problems with their pitch, and they were not helped by a big downpour on Friday last week, and another late on Saturday morning.
For eight weeks they had trained in a gym to preserve the ground, and they had marked out a second pitch — where hockey used to be played — in a better-drained area of Wairoa Athletic Park.
They considered getting in their cars and coming to Gisborne to play at Childers Road Reserve. But after consulting Central Football and Thistle, they decided to go ahead with the game on the newly developed field which, while it had some, had considerably less surface water than the main ground.
Walters said Thistle came to the party by travelling to the game in a bus that brought supporters who were out to make a day of it. And Wairoa’s sponsor, Quality Roading and Services (QRS), had a trailer-mounted electronic road sign there, beaming out supportive messages.
The game was tense and well supported. Eliki Ravosai and Carlos Carroll scored the goals, and the man of the match award went to the whole team.
Prominent players during the season had been Ravosai, who had come to the team after being injured playing centre for the Athletic rugby team . . . it turned out he had played football in Fiji to international level; Marek Schirnack, who had been a key player in the team for several years and was still improving; goalkeeper Paul Kavanagh, a policeman who finished work at 3am on Saturday and started again at 5pm that day; and central defenders Jason Smith and Mike Hardie, who looked after everyone else in the team.
Team spirit was such that when Carlos Carroll — one of last year’s team who played rugby for Tapuae this year but was still registered — was available for the weekend, players volunteered to make way. He came on as a substitute and scored.
Wairoa are not in the end-of-season knockout competition. They’re ready for a break.
