OPINION: Warriors are supposed to have a lean and hungry look. They keep getting up, they keep coming at you until the field is strewn with bodies and their broadsword bleeds. So how did New Zealand's rugby league team come by their name and why can they not live up to it? The Warriors just held on at the weekend, but their knees were buckling and they were ready to lose.
The great Andrew Johns once said: "There's this sort of fairytale in Australia that if you push the Warriors for 60 minutes you can come over the top of their guys."
It didn't look much of a fairytale to me. The biteless Bulldogs scarcely nuzzled the Warriors for 60 minutes and they still nearly came over the top of them. It's a problem that just won't seem to go away.
Coach Andrew McFadden hates the reputation that the Warriors have for a lack of stamina.
He sacked the conditioning coaches and brought in Dayne Norton to put a bit of ticker into the team. And yet they are still going absent at the end of games.
The Warriors' aggregate score in the final ten minutes of the seven matches they have played so far this season is 14-38. Only once have they scored the final try of the game. Against Canterbury, many of the players looked nearly out on their feet.
It would be wrong to say they are not fit. Compared to most of us the Warriors are Supermen. But either they are not fit enough or they are the wrong body type or they lack heart because in the World of the NRL they are the Warriors of Wheeze.
Some of it must be attitude or awareness. How is it possible that Bodene Thompson can fail to back-up a kick in the first half a tap-down from which he would have scored if he could have been bothered to shift and yet make a magnificent match-saving tackle on Sam Perrett in the final minutes.
Mark Reason believes Warriors players could learn some lessons from rugby union's Ardie Savea, who is showing the benefits of his fitness work with Gordon Tietjens.
But some of it is down to fitness. My guess is that players from other teams are putting in a lot more miles in the off-season before they come back to camp than the Warriors. Any runner will tell you that you can't fake it. I tried it at university and didn't get away with it. You just have to put in the background miles.
Daley Thompson, the great British decathlete, used to train on Christmas Day because he knew it was the one day of the year on which his rivals would not be training. He felt it gave him an edge. Watching the Warriors you wonder, with the honourable exception of the tireless Simon Mannering, just how much they all train in the holidays.
Stamina has become golden in professional sport. Barcelona and Bayern Munich changed football with the amount of running they did off the ball. The match became a 90 minute press. Atletico Madrid are the new superstars of stamina, relentlessly running down opposition that included Barca in the recent Champions League quarter.Warren Gatland knew that the only chance Wales had at the World Cup was if they were super fit. He took them to altitude and he took them into heat. He lost players, because suddenly-upped training regimes have been shown to increase the likelihood of injury. But Wales beat England because they were fitter when it mattered.
Look at the guys that have come back to Super Rugby from the brutal fitness regime of Gordon Tietjens, New Zealand's sevens guru. Rieko Ioane and Ardie Savea have been two of the finest players of recent weeks. It's not just the legs that last longer. When an athlete is super fit his mind stays alert.
It was Savea who spotted the ball out the back of a ruck on the Rebels goal-line and dived over for a try. Fitness heightens awareness. Savea is never going to be the body type of some open-sides and speed all over the pitch for 80 minutes. He jogs about and then, when it is his time, he plays with bursts of speed and power.Ioane brought something similar to the Blues game against the Sharks. In the 63rd minute he took a ball in midfield and was tackled by three Sharks players. Ioane got his leg drive going and ploughed seven metres up the pitch despite the weights dragging him down.
Twenty seconds later he received the ball near halfway from Ihaia West off a kick return. Ioane beat the entire Sharks cover on the outside and scored they try that won the match. It was a try that was made possible by Ioane's superb conditioning. Gordon Tietjens won that game for the Blues.
It is not a try that Julian Savea could have scored. The Hurricanes management have spun stories in their needless desire to protect Ardie's elder brother. But Julian Savea has not been properly fit for two years now and has gone from having the potential to be one of the greatest wingers of all time to a useful basher who will be lucky to keep his place in the All Blacks.
The old New Zealand halfback was an extra flanker. No more, as Aaron Smith says: "now that they put an emphasis on speed and fitness". The All Blacks run the opposition ragged. So do most of the Super 18 teams. The Jaguares were left breathless by the Crusaders.
Tietjens says: "The team that wins gold at Rio is probably going to be one of the best-conditioned teams on the circuit."
That is now true of most sports, from football's Champions League to rugby's World Cup. Golden warriors do the hard yards.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/opinio...n-why-cant-the-warriors-live-up-to-their-name
