Double Strike!

THEY TRULY are a strange pairing.

Balding and quiet, slim in his business suit, Grant Young doesn't look like the striker with the deadly touch who has scored 55 goals in 100 games.

The ever-smiling Keryn Jordan doesn't look like man who came to New Zealand after being car-jacked at gunpoint, then fought cancer and the Immigration Department to stay in New Zealand.

And would you imagine that even at the venerable ages of 37 and 33 respectively, these two South African expatriates remain, consistently, the best strike pairing in New Zealand domestic football?

Young has just played his 100th game for the NZFC's leading club, Auckland City, the first player to achieve that mark since franchise-based competition began five years ago; Jordan has played 61 times for City and notched 49 goals.

On the field, neither is physically imposing, but even against the burliest, dirtiest centrebacks, their complementary styles find a way through.

This year is likely to be little different, even if Young admits that age has adapted his approach. "You only run when you have to," he says. "I found that out the hard way," interjects Jordan lightly. "I'm doing the running for him."

It was April 2004 when Grant Young arrived in Auckland; August the same year that Keryn Jordan turned up. They had heard of each other, even played against each other in the South African national league, almost overlapped in the national squad (Young won one cap, Jordan two) but never met.

On a decent wage as a printer, Young had long since given up on making football pay fulltime, and emigrated only with lifestyle ambitions, not sporting ones. "I came here not with the idea of playing football, but working on my golf game, which needs a lot of work," he says. He was playing over-30s for East Coast Bays when he was spotted by Auckland's winter sister club, Central United.

For Jordan, emigrating was a decision made when a gun was pointed at his head. "The country was just getting worse," he says, deadpan. "You don't want that kind of thing to happen to your wife and son."

Imported by City's arch-rival, Waitakere, with a promise of an eventual contract with the little-lamented New Zealand Knights that never materialised, he instead shifted to City a season later. Jordan recently secured permanent residency after fearing a battle with skin cancer might weaken his case to stay and has no intention of returning home.

Young has been back to South Africa on holiday. "Once you've been there three or four days, it's as if you never left ... [but] you get homesick for New Zealand."

Given their goal-scoring records, it's clear both could have stepped up a tier. The Knights wanted Young, but then 32, he felt he was too old and by the time they realised they'd made a mistake in not signing Jordan, he too felt they had missed their chance.

"By that stage, I could see the writing on the wall, the club was going nowhere, the directors didn't seem to know what they were doing and the style they were playing was historical '80s-style football," he says.

That prompts the pairs' major observation about Kiwi soccer: that too many teams still stick to the old-school, no-frills British style. Young says the game here is played at "100 miles an hour", and as a result, Kiwi players lack composure. Asked about standards since his arrival in New Zealand, he says bluntly: "I think it has got worse."

Jordan, who is to work for City in youth development, is more optimistic but says coaches must be sent overseas to learn a new approach. "There is a huge wealth of potential here," he says. "I see a bit of a lull at this stage where the old style is getting pushed out and a new style needs to be harnessed."

And neither has any qualms about admitting their biggest advantage is simply that they were better coached. "When you have been brought up in a professional environment," says Jordan, "and been taught by professional coaches and people who have been in the game for a long time, when you play with someone with the same pedigree [Young], it just comes naturally."

Given the inconsistency of the NZFC, which City won in each of its first three seasons, it was the club's 2006 trip to the Fifa Club World Cup which provided the "big carrot" to keep both playing in the hope it is dangled again.

After relinquishing the domestic title to Waitakere last year, City must now watch them go to Japan instead. "I think our level has dropped," concedes Jordan. "We are obviously in the rebuilding phase ... we just weren't as dominant as we have been and their timing was right."

Two wins from two games so far suggests City are back. Wednesday's derby against Waitakere may confirm that and another title might just keep Young young.

Is this his last season? "I say that every year," he says with a grin.