That's is a good write up by Fred. Him and Piney are really the only two Journos whose articles I read and go 'that's a good article' Michael Burgess is coming along.
Yeah, we're lucky Woodcock is now sports editor of the Press newspaper here in Christchurch. Guarantees good football coverage. Especially since Tony Smith is the senior sports journalist on the paper since some elderly rugby types retired a few years ago.
The Press has been a very football-friendly paper for a decade now going back to when Paul Thompson, a former national league player & All White was editor (I know he's disliked by many in Wellington but here he was good value and literally put football on the front page - Ryan Nelsen only had to sneeze to make it on the front page. All sorts of footballs stories made it to the front page).
Even mid-Canterbury paper the Ashburton Guardian has a football guy as editor - Dutch immigrant Coen Lammers, who was deputy editor, sports editor & sports & general reporter of the Press for a decade until this year, and originally a football reporter in the Netherlands. He told me once, the first New Zealander he'd ever heard of as a young football fan and reporter in the Netherlands, was Wynton Rufer who he saw play a few times. Lammers was a sports reporter 1991-1994 in Holland at the height of Wynton's career.
Here's an amusing story typifying how the old guard of rugby and league types were "eased out" of employment at the Press by the new guard of Lammers etc. amidst some strife: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10481936