Ben Matulino of the Warriors. Photo / Getty Images
The Eden Park league curse lives on and the home team again made a lot of their own bad luck.
Brian McClennan's reign as Warriors coach opened with a gripping but error-ridden loss to NRL champions Manly. A roaring crowd of 40,000 tried to lift the Warriors but was left
with that old flat Eden Park feeling again.
This was league's fourth match at the rugby and cricket stronghold - the Kiwis have lost two tests including the 1988 World Cup final, and the Warriors have been beaten by Parramatta and now the Sea Eagles.
The weather was superb despite the weekend's storm warnings. Pre-match skydivers rained down instead, a few crash landing and one being stretchered away. The new Warriors ownership team of Owen Glenn and Eric Watson were introduced to the crowd, but Manly applied brakes to the feelgood factor.
Like the crocked skydiver, the Warriors will live on but the error rate must be reduced. Chief among the culprits was Manu Vatuvei, a shocker-in-waiting, it seems. Vatuvei's handling slipped against Manly and it's hard to know how to rectify an intermittently recurring problem with a 130-game veteran., apart from looking for a successor. Fullback Kevin Locke was another to make crucial errors.
