There wasn’t too much on offer around the Waikato Bay of Plenty region this weekend, with all the top local NRFL sides in Chatham Cup action up in Auckland (I’m not scheduled to head back up that way until next weekend). So I decided to trick my family into heading to the beach for the afternoon…with a stand-out ulterior motive – popping in ‘quickly’ for a look at Tauranga reserves versus Matamata...
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If you run a search in Google Images for ‘football+pantomime+villain’ you’ll find photos of Luis Suarez, Mario Ballotelli, Diego Maradona and even Robbie Savage, among others. If you added ‘+Tauranga’ to your search you should really come up with a photo of Dave Cook (you don’t, but that’s probably because there just aren’t too many images of the man on the web). Cookie is the man...
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I realise that no matter how hard I try to appear unbiased, anyone who knows of my association with Matamata Swifts will instantly wipe that away and zero straight in on my biased-ness. That goes double for any attempted constructive criticism of the match officials. So how should I call this one? Bugger it. I’ll just call it as I saw it. For me, this was actually a great afternoon out because I got to be a fan again, if only...
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