SOCCER - Where did that sublime football go?

HAMISH BIDWELL
Please let it be Park Island where Hawke's Bay United clicks this season.
Honestly, they are going to absolutely demolish someone in this New Zealand Football Championship and, having watched them play so rankly for so long, it would be great for the fans to see it at home.
You kind of had to sit there and think "how good was that" when they scored during Saturday's 2-1 victory over Canterbury United. The 3rd and 30th-minute goals to Graham Fyfe and Stu Wilson really were high class.
Equally, though, you spent much of the remaining hour wondering where that sublime football had disappeared to. If they ever find it for 90 minutes, heaven help the opposition.
"That's the frustrating part," head coach Jonathan Gould said after the match.
"We know these lads have it in them to play fantastic football. We just aren't quite seeing enough of it at the moment."
It's here that we should pause for a second. A year ago, Hawke's Bay had gone 32 matches without a win. On Saturday they won for the third time in six matches.
Are we happy? Amazingly, not really.
One unlucky punter actually got the "death stare" from Gould, after voicing their dismay at the breakdown of another promising attack. No-one wants the team to play the perfect 90 minutes more than Gould but we have to keep things in perspective.
"Look, I think this was a great win ... particularly because we didn't play very well. We opened the game very well but, at that point, I don't think we remembered how we'd scored those goals," Gould said.
"If you've got players with pace, you got to release the ball early and in front of them and we didn't see those types of passes after that point. But this was a big win for us, mentally, because it puts a cushion between us and Manawatu and now the other teams have to win twice to catch us.
"The challenge for us now is to go to Waikato with that same hatchet mentality."
That way of thinking was best demonstrated - again - by Cole Peverley. Moved forward from defence to midfield, Peverley added some real bite to Hawke's Bay's play. He may be only 19 but that boy is hard, he's a winner and a tremendous asset to this team.
They're traits shared by Jarrod Smith, who laid on the goals from Fyfe and Wilson and looked to be returning to some sort of sharpness after his injury problems and All Whites absences.
"I'm obviously not 100 per cent back but the more we all play together and the longer I can stay on the pitch, then the better things will get," Smith said. "I would've liked to have got a goal myself today and my old man is giving me a bit of crap. But that's the only disappointment about today and all that really matters is that we got the three points."