Heartbreaking News: New Zealand Warriors Player Steve Price Is Gone…

They’ve come from all over the NRL landscape, mostly because the Warriors themselves were trudging over the same foreign terrain to keep the competition afloat.

Shaun Johnson and Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad had to come home. Addin Fonua-Blake had to find a new one.

Dallin Watene-Zelezniak came with a $400,000 sweetener from Canterbury; Jackson Ford came just looking for a crack and more than 20 minutes a game.

Coach Andrew Webster’s own road to the Warriors saw him captain-coaching at Connecticut and cleaning up rubbish at Hull KR. At the Warriors, he has pulled together a squad sourced predominantly from outside New Zealand, to the point 14 of his starting 17 against the Broncos have been recruited from NRL rivals.

For a Kiwi outfit determined to be a development club, things have been backwards in more ways than one – with around $2.5 million invested in star forwards Fonua-Blake, Tohu Harris and Marata Niukore dwarfing the money spent on Webster’s cut-price playmaking spine.

But then the Warriors know better than anyone, a pandemic means things are done a little differently.

“A lot of the roster has been brought together by circumstances to a degree,” recruitment manager and former head coach Andrew McFadden says.

“For three years there’s been a bit of patching things up. But getting home last year the emphasis was on recruiting proven, quality, experienced players.