Wests Tigers coach Benji Marshall takes his team to Auckland this weekend for a crunch match. Big League revisits the day the Kiwi icon broke the hearts of his countrymen at Mount Smart Stadium in 2011.
Benji Marshall finished off a stellar 2010 season as the toast of New Zealand, captaining the Kiwis to a memorable Four Nations triumph and collecting the Golden Boot.
But Whakatane’s finest approached Wests Tigers’ mid-2011 assignment at Mount Smart Stadium without a win – or a try – against the Warriors in Auckland.
“I can tick those off now,” Marshall said after engineering a 26-22 win courtesy of one of the NRL era’s most spectacular comebacks with two tries and two try assists.
“I haven’t had much joy over here so it was well-timed.”
The sixth-placed Warriors led the seventh-placed Tigers 8-4 at halftime.
The hosts powered to a 22-4 advantage after Feleti Mateo put Manu Vatuvei over out wide, rookie halfback Shaun Johnson opened his NRL tryscoring account with a blazing 50-metre solo effort, and a helter skelter long-range movement kick-started by a James Maloney chip and featuring Mateo and Johnson set Vatuvei up for his second.
Facing a near-insurmountable task, the Tigers climbed back into the contest in the 63rd minute when English second-rower Gareth Ellis produced a miraculous flick pass for Marshall to stroll over.
A Marshall bomb then produced a try for ex-Warriors fullback Wade McKinnon, before the No.6 wizard backed up a long break from future Warrior Blake Ayshford to level the scores with eight minutes left.
A deft basketball pass from Marshall opened up a corridor for winger Beau Ryan to score the match-winner, while Marshall raised the ire of the Warriors and the baying Mount Smart crowd by casually running the ball over his own dead-ball line to wind the last few seconds down – sparking a post-siren melee.
The Tigers performed their stunning revival against the backdrop of the club’s bombshell announcement just days earlier that popular forwards Bryce Gibbs and Andrew Fifita would not be re-signed.
“We were rocked when we found out the guys are going,” Ayshford said.
“But we are getting paid by the Tigers to play football. We are using their leaving as a positive – that this is our last chance to achieve something together as a group.
“I think that desperation kicked in with that final 20 minutes.”
The home side was left wondering how they’d let a seemingly unlosable game slip away.
“I gave one message: that we were only three tries ahead. The game can turn pretty quickly and that’s exactly what happened,” Warriors coach Ivan Cleary lamented post-match.
“I think in their head they probably knew that but in the end we didn’t handle it as well as we needed to. I can’t get past the fact we should have never lost that game.
“Credit to them, they had nothing to lose in that last quarter of the game and came up with some impressive stuff. But we just needed to get a bit of composure, make a couple of defensive plays when it really mattered and we would have got the points, but we just couldn’t.”
The Warriors would exact high-stakes revenge just three months later via a remarkable fightback of their own. Down 18-6 at halftime of the clubs’ sudden-death semi at Allianz Stadium, the Warriors scored in the dying stages to snatch a 22-20 upset on their way to a surprise grand final appearance.
The Tigers have not featured in a playoffs match since.
Meanwhile, Marshall’s next visit to Mount Smart as a Tigers player was in 2018 – coached, coincidentally, by Cleary as he kicked the winning field goal in an 11-10 victory over Melbourne Storm as part of a double-header at the venue.
