New kids on the block
Wellington Phoenix academy products Ben Waine and Sam Sutton are looking for firstteam football, but they have their work cut out to earn it. Andrew Voerman reports.
Wellington Phoenix fans have become accustomed to having Kiwi teenagers in their side over the past three years, with Sarpreet Singh and Liberato Cacace setting the A-League alight before moving on to Europe, and Germany and Belgium respectively.
But with those two All Whites gone, the spotlight has naturally shifted to the next products to emerge from the club’s academy – forward Ben Waine, who is starting the second year of a two-year contract, and midfielder Sam Sutton, who put pen to paper on a three-year contract in August.
While they are both players with plenty of potential, the duo have plenty of work to do if they are to force their way into coach Ufuk Talay’s plans – and as far as Waine’s concerned, he wouldn’t have it any other way. ‘‘If it wasn’t challenging, if there wasn’t some goal to aim for, or a direction I wanted to go in, it would make playing less enjoyable and a lot harder,’’ he said.
‘‘When you’ve got a goal in mind or a place you want to be, like in that starting XI, then everything’s driven by that, so it makes finding the motivation to work harder a lot easier.’’
Waine made his Phoenix debut against Perth Glory towards the end of the 2018-19 season and immediately caught the eye because of his tremendous work rate, a quality that had helped make him a bolter for the 2019 Fifa Under-20 World Cup, where he scored a brace in New Zealand’s 5-1 win over Honduras.
He signed his first professional contract upon returning from the World Cup and scored his first Phoenix goal in the fourth round of last season, against Melbourne City, but ended up playing just a tick over 200 minutes across the course of the campaign.
It was an understandable turn of events, with Englishmen David Ball and Gary Hooper installed as the club’s first-choice forwards and Jaushua Sotirio backing them up. Waine said he learned ‘‘quite a few things’’ which he is hoping to put into practice this season, where Hooper has been replaced by another striker with English Premier League experience in Tomer Hemed, and young Australian Mirza Muratovic has also entered the mix, making the battle for playing time even harder.
‘‘You have to work really hard to get to professional football in the first place, but to stay there and then to kick on – to get into the first team and be a regular player, which I’m trying to do at the moment – you have to work 10 times harder.
‘‘Having people like Gary Hooper in the team or defenders like Stevie [Taylor] last year, and other attackers like Bally, they gave me a lot of good pointers and hopefully it’s the same this year, with us bringing in Tomer.’’
Sutton should have been handed a contract at the start of last season, as he spent the entire season training with the first team, made his debut off the bench in December against Sydney FC, then added three more appearances, including a start against Adelaide United.
He was finally handed the security of a three-year contract ahead of this season and has now moved on to his next goal: ‘‘To get more game time and push for a starting spot and help as much as I can to create history for this club’’.
In the club’s academy setup and in his handful of appearances last year, Sutton has mainly been used in midfield, and usually in more of an attacking role than a defensive one, but Talay has earmarked him to play left back, the position where Cacace made a name for himself over the past two years.
‘‘After I signed I had a chat with the gaffer, and he told me he’d seen the way I play, and he’d seen I’ve got a good left foot on me, and thought I had all the qualities to play that left back role,’’ Sutton said.
‘‘With Libby gone there are big shoes to fill, but I’ve got to believe in myself, and I’ve been working hard over the off-season, learning the position and working hard on changing my habits to the habits of a left back.’’ When the Phoenix begin their season away against the Brisbane Roar on December 29, Sutton is expected to back up All White James McGarry, another academy product who has returned to the club after playing only 15 minutes during his first three-year stint there, from 2015 to 2018.
Sutton and Waine can take heart that there have tended to be more opportunities given to young Kiwis in recent years than there were in McGarry’s day, but they still have their work cut out if they’re to make an impact this season, which begins with the Phoenix based in Wollongong in New South Wales, where the duo are sharing an apartment with Muratovic. ‘‘As a young player, you’re always . . . trying to get some minutes and establish yourself in the league and in the team, so first and foremost, that’s what I’m going to be trying to do,’’ Sutton said.