Auckland Warriors debut

The Auckland Warriors played their first match in the New South Wales Rugby League’s expanded Winfield Cup competition.

Thirty thousand fans at a revamped Mt Smart stadium – and hundreds of thousands more watching free-to-air television – saw New Zealand’s first fully professional rugby league team and glamour boys Brisbane Broncos run onto the field, heralded by a haka, dry ice and a frenzied ground announcer. The actual match was something of an anticlimax, with the Broncos prevailing 25–22.

Coached by John Monie and captained by Dean Bell, the Warriors had their first win in their third match, only to be stripped of the two points for inadvertently fielding too many replacements. That was the margin by which they eventually missed out on the end-of-season playoffs. After a year in the breakaway Super League Telstra Cup competition in 1997, the rebranded New Zealand Warriors made the National Rugby League (NRL) playoffs for the first time in 2001.

The Warriors’ best year so far has been 2002, when they were minor premiers (topping the regular season table) and reached the grand final. In the next decade they made the playoffs five more times, reaching the grand final again in 2011. The NRL title has so far eluded them.

Image: Auckland Warriors original logo (Wikipedia)