New Zealand woolhandling team places on the line at Merino Shears

Gisborne woolhandler Joel Henare at the Canterbury Shears in 2016. Photo / SSNZ

The opportunity to represent New Zealand on an international stage has been thrown wide open.

Both the winner and runner-up in the New Zealand Shears open woolhandling final in Alexandra on September 30 will now represent New Zealand in the Transtasman series revival test match in Australia three weeks later.

The decision comes after 2021 winner Joel Henare confirmed he is unavailable for the 2022-2023 series and intends stepping back from a usually heavy schedule.

Henare has competed in a series-record 14 transtasman woolhandling tests since his first in Hay, NSW, in 2008 at the age of 15.

He has also won 113 individual Open titles, including two World Championships, along with two teams World Championships titles.

Henare will be at the two days of the Merino Shears shearing and woolhandling championships which open the 2022-2023 New Zealand Shearing Sports season in Alexandra on September 30-October 1.

He will fulfill the dual roles of both competing and commentating, with plans do the same at the Waimate Spring Shears in South Canterbury a week later.

Henare will then return to Gisborne to help with the season's opening event in the North Island - his home Poverty Bay A and P Shears on October 15.

From there, though, he is ruling himself out of most of the rest of the competition season, which includes being unlikely to contest an eight-show series to find New Zealand's two woolhandlers for the 2023 World Championships in Scotland.

Shearing Sports New Zealand will send a team of three machine shearers, two woolhandlers and two blade shearers for the separate Transtasman tests during the Australian shearing and Woolhandling Championships in Bendigo, Vic, on October 21-22.

They will be the first tests since the New Zealand home leg at the Golden Shears in Masterton in March 2022, just three weeks before the first pandemic lockdown and a near shutdown of international travel.

Those already confirmed in the team are Southland machine shearers Leon Samuels and Nathan Stratford, winners of the PGG Wrightson Vetmed national shearing circuit in 2021 and 2022 respectively.

The third machine shearer will be the best-performing other New Zealand shearer in the Merino Shears Open shearing championship.

The blade shearers will be the 2019 World Champion pairing of Allan Oldfield, of Geraldine, and Tony Dobbs, of Fairlie.

Team manager and shearing judge is Greg Stuart, of Alexandra, and Gail Haitana, of Bulls, travels as woolhandling judge.