Warriors home in on hoodoo

Team desperate to avoid setting 20-year record in NRL against Manly Sea Eagles

The Warriors will hope to avoid an unwanted NRL milestone tomorrow night against Manly. As well as needing a good performance against the Sea Eagles to get their season back on track, the Auckland team should have extra motivation to earn a victory.

Another defeat would create history, bringing up the longest streak of losses at their Mt Smart base in the club’s history.

The team’s victory song hasn’t been heard in Penrose since round four, a stretch of almost 18 weeks.

In that time the Warriors have dropped games to the Cowboys, Knights, Broncos, Storm, Panthers and Raiders.

To put that stretch in context, the last time the Warriors endured such a poor run at home, coach Stephen Kearney was still playing.

His last game for the club — a 38-12 loss to Manly — in round 24 of the 1998 season started a sequence that extended to the first week of May in the following year.

This year’s run has been terminal to the team’s overall chances of success.

Their record away from Mt Smart has been respectable (5-5), with wins in Wellington, Brisbane, Penrith, Newcastle and the Gold Coast, while they were also dreadfully unlucky in Melbourne on Anzac Day and against the Eels.

But the home form (two wins, six losses) has been a killer.

Losing to the Storm (round 13) is no embarrassment, and the Raiders were red-hot last week, but some other performances are harder to explain.

Although there have been some close games, the only wins at Mt Smart in 2019 have come against the bottom two teams on the NRL ladder.

“Maybe change the name of the stadium, put on the away strip,” joked Blake Green. “[I’m] not sure what the difference is.”

Senior forward Adam Blair pointed to the extra time spent together on transtasman trips as a correlation.

“When you go away you build a lot of close relationships and that connection stays really tight because you do a lot of good things together,” said Blair.

“[But] I couldn’t put a finger on why the team hasn’t been performing at home. There has obviously been some pretty poor performances and we’ve been really inconsistent.”

For his part, Kearney played down talk of a pattern.

“Every game is different but we have put ourselves under pressure,” he said.

“Against the Cowboys our execution allowed them back into the game and it was the same with the Broncos here and the Panthers match. There were parts of our performances where we beat ourselves, because we didn’t execute well enough.”

On a couple of occasions this season the Warriors have stayed together in hotels the night before a match in Auckland to replicate the away day feel, but Kearney said that is not feasible all the time.

“You have to remember, we are away for three days when we go to Australia,” said Kearney.

“It’s not a hour drive from Parramatta into the city, or 40 minutes along the M4 to Penrith. The boys are away a fair bit so to bring them home and then take them away again into camp is a lot. Sometimes we do that, where we think that’s important.”

“[But] it doesn’t matter if it is a home or away, executing what we think is going to work for us is the most important thing.

‘‘We have shown that it doesn’t matter if we play away from home; if we can do it away from home, why can’t we do it at home?”

We have shown that it doesn’t matter if we play away from home; if we can do it away from home, why can’t we do it at home? Coach Stephen Kearney