English Premier League striker Chris Wood: The Waikato years

Thursday, 14 November 2024

The last time Chris Wood played football in Hamilton, he was a schoolboy on the verge of moving to the other side of the world.

Two years as a scholar at West Bromwich Albion were all that were promised to him as a 16-year-old, but he has now been playing in England for 16 years and counting.

As he returns to Hamilton this week, to play a World Cup qualifier with the All Whites on Friday night at Stadium Waikato, his stock has never been higher.

He has scored eight goals in 11 matches for Nottingham Forest in the English Premier League this season and was crowned player of the month for October.

All Whites coach Darren Bazeley said this week that Wood’s current run of form was “something that may not happen again”.

“For a New Zealander to be playing at that level, in that form – it’s hard to comprehend here, the magnitude of what he is doing.”

But in the stands on Friday night, there will be plenty of people who do understand what Wood has achieved, because they were there during his Waikato years, when he was just a teenage boy scoring goals for fun.

Cambridge FC

While Wood was born in Auckland, his family moved to Cambridge when he was 11 when dad Grant got a new job, and it was at Cambridge FC that he took his first steps in senior football, aged 14 in 2006.

Patrick Woodlock was 18 then, in the second season of a Cambridge career that would end with him making more than 300 appearances, and he remembers Wood’s debut in the third-tier Northern League second division fondly.

“He came off the bench in the final 10 minutes at John Kerkhof Park,” the club’s home ground, Woodlock recalls. “He was a tall 14-year-old and even though he looked young he didn’t look out of place in size.

“It would've been maybe his second or third touch of the ball when he managed to score a goal leading to a Cambridge win.”

Hamilton Wanderers

Wood turned 15 in December 2006, then moved to Hamilton Wanderers, who had just been promoted to the Northern League premier division, two tiers higher, for the 2007 winter season.

Wanderers’ squad had been depleted over the summer, which meant coach Mark Cossey immediately handed opportunities to the teenage striker, who started to score goals on a regular basis, including four in a Chatham Cup match on Queen’s Birthday.

One of his team-mates was Sam Wilkinson, the son of assistant coach Roger Wilkinson, who would go on to have a big hand in getting Wood over to England for a trial at West Brom a few months later.

“I remember thinking at the time he was just really lucky,” says Sam. “But then when goal number seven or eight or nine goes in and they're all the same, you start thinking, this isn't just a lucky schoolboy – there's something in his movement or the way he anticipates things, that he's always lurking and latching on to things.

“Like in his career now, he didn't always have a great deal of involvement in the build-up play. I always said you wouldn't go and watch 20 minutes of a game, necessarily, and go, that kid there – he's the best player on the pitch.

“But then by the end of the game, you would often see he had scored again, or he had scored a couple. He just had that real knack for being in the right place at the right time.

“He was a really calm finisher and the other thing he had, even as a schoolboy playing with men, was, if he missed chances, it never seemed to impact him too much. He didn't look like he lost confidence and he still wanted to get in the same areas.”

St Paul’s Collegiate

Another 15-year-old at Wanderers at the time who would go on to become an All White was Marco Rojas, who recalled this month that his most vivid memories of a teenage Wood were their battles for their rival high schools, with Rojas at Fraser High School and Wood at St Paul’s Collegiate.

“We played against each other a fair bit. He would always score a lot of goals against us, which was frustrating.

“He was pretty big for that age too. He was strong. He had that power with the finesse that he's got now.'

Wood’s coach at St Paul’s was former All White Mike Groom, who remembers “a growing sense of awareness in the football community that there was the emergence of this young player who had this innate ability to be able to score goals”.

“As coach of St Paul’s, it took nine long years for us to beat Hamilton Boys’ High School, who were then – and still are – the measure of all secondary schools in the region.

“As a year 10 student, inevitably Chris was on the scoresheet when we beat them. I can see it now. We took it down to the byline and pulled it back and somehow Chris anticipated it and found his way between two defenders, and did a diving header that went into the bottom corner.

“We eventually won the game 3-2. That was in the semifinal of a knockout cup and we went on to win the final.”

New Zealand

Wood’s goalscoring feats for club and school meant he forced his way into the New Zealand squad for the 2007 FIFA Under-17 World Cup in South Korea, where he was the eighth-youngest player at the tournament.

Roger Wilkinson had encouraged his former employers at West Brom to have a look at Wood when he played at the World Cup and shortly afterwards he went there – as well as to a couple of other clubs – on trial.

As Sam Wilkinson, who would later follow his dad back to the Midlands club’s academy, tells it: “The story goes that he had done OK at West Brom, but not amazing, then played in a trial game there and scored twice, and they thought, alright. Then they played him in another game and he scored, and they thought, yeah, there's enough there to warrant signing him”.

Waikato FC

Wood had to wait until the start of the English season after he turned 16 to take up his two-year scholarship contract, so he returned to New Zealand, where the next step for him was a debut for Waikato FC in the National League, with Roger Wilkinson at the helm.

These days, Steven Holloway is best known as a co-host of the Between Two Beers podcast, but back in the 2007-08 summer, he was Waikato’s leading striker, back home after years away playing at a college in the United States.

He remembers watching Wood play for St Paul’s and coming away thinking that nothing about him really caught the eye – except for the fact that he scored four goals.

“That's turned out to be the most valuable and important skill, which no-one else can replicate, and you can't teach – seeing how the game's going to unfold and getting into good areas and then being super clinical when you're there.”

They would become team-mates at Waikato FC, with Wood making five goalless appearances in the closing stages of the season. His first start, against Waitakere United, put him up against Darren Bazeley, who is now his coach with the All Whites.

“My claim to fame these days is that I was a striker that kept Chris Wood on the bench,” says Holloway. “But the part I don't tell is that he was 15 or 16 at the time.

“There was a training session before a game and we were practising defensive corners, and it was my job to mark Chris, who was representing the other team’s striker, and he just kept scoring. He kept climbing over the top of me and bullying me and bulleting these headers into the bottom corner.

“I remember getting a bollocking from Rog: ”What the f… is going on? How's this kid scoring on us?

“I remember in my head thinking, ‘Yes, fair enough, he is scoring, and I should be doing better. But also – he's really quite good’.”

England

Wood’s last act in New Zealand domestic football – for now – was to play another half a season for Wanderers before moving to England in July 2008. His mother, Julie, moved with him, while there was a familiar face at the academy in the form of Roger Wilkinson, who had coincidentally returned there himself.

Nine months later, an injury crisis at West Brom meant Wood made a shock Premier League debut off the bench away to Portsmouth. Two months after that, he was an All White, making his debut against Tanzania under Ricki Herbert. Three months further still and he had scored his first goal in English football, against Doncaster Rovers in the second-tier Championship.

As he approaches his 33rd birthday in December, Wood has now played 492 league matches for 12 different English clubs and scored 163 goals, including 77 in 238 matches in the Premier League. He has also scored 16 times in 44 cup matches and four times in 11 appearances in the Europa League.

Now – for the first, and potentially last, time – he gets to play for the All Whites in the region where it all began almost two decades ago, looking to add to his 36 goals in 78 appearances for his country against Vanuatu.

“Him coming back here is a beacon,” says Groom. “It's a lighthouse. It's a neon sign to all these aspiring young players that they can do it – that if you come from Hamilton, or you come from Cambridge, you can do it. You can rise to those levels.

“All those young kids in All Whites shirts with Wood written on the back of them – they will know that if he did it, they can do it too.”