Winston Reid's All Whites career comes full circle as it comes to an end

Winston Reid’s international football career will come full circle this weekend, just not in the way he had hoped.

The All Whites captain wanted his final matches to be at the World Cup in Qatar in November, but he has had to settle for a clash with Australia at Eden Park in Auckland on Sunday [kickoff 4pm] as his farewell from national team duty.

He is set to lead the side out against the same team he faced on his debut in 2010, in the city where he was born and first played the game, in front of a crowd that is expected to be more than 30,000-strong.

In June 2010, Reid secured a place in All Whites folklore, scoring a late header against Slovakia in their opening match at the World Cup in South Africa that allowed the country to celebrate a history-making 1-1 draw.

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In August that year, he secured a move from FC Midtjylland in Denmark – where he had lived since leaving New Zealand as a 10-year-old – to West Ham United in England and became the sixth and most recent Kiwi footballer to play in the English Premier League – the pinnacle of the club game.

After spending more than 18 months sidelined in 2018 and 2019, he has also added Sporting Kansas City in the United States and Brentford in England to his short list of clubs, but for most of the past year, he has had a singular focus.

Once he finalised a release from his West Ham contract last September, he moved to Dubai, and from then until June, the one thing he wanted more than anything else in football was to qualify for the World Cup again.

In March, he marshalled the All Whites superbly as they navigated the Oceania qualifying tournament in Qatar and in June, he was there again as they faced Costa Rica in a one-off playoff for a place at November’s tournament, but ultimately lost 1-0.

New Zealand sports fans will have Reid’s header at Royal Bafokeng Stadium in 2010 etched in their memories for the rest of time – striker Shane Smeltz turning around on the left edge of the box, his cross curling in, the centre back rising in the box and steering the ball into the corner of the goal before ripping his shirt off as he went wild in celebration.

They will also know Reid hasn’t always had the most cooperative body. He only made more than 30 league appearances once in his first seven seasons at West Ham, before suffering a devastating knee injury in March 2018 in what turned out to be his last competitive outing for the East London club.

He will retire from the All Whites having missed more national team matches (47) than he played (33) and Sunday’s will be just his 35th for club and country since he returned from that knee injury against the Republic of Ireland in Dublin in November 2019, almost three years ago.

In managing his fitness, Reid has worked with the doctors and physios at his clubs as well as those at New Zealand Football, including long-time All Whites head physio Roland Jeffery. But since 2014, he has also worked with his own independent Danish consultant, Klavs Svendsen, who has become part of the All Whites setup as well.

Svendsen first came into the New Zealand environment at the 2017 Confederations Cup, even though that was a tournament Reid was ultimately forced to miss, and has been around whenever the centre back has been since then, working not only with him, but with the rest of the playing squad as well.

Aside from Reid’s family – wife Yana and their twins – it’s likely no-one knows him better. Svendsen was there to witness his long-awaited return to action in 2019 – at a time when West Ham had him on a tight leash – and was there to witness his pain in the wake of the World Cup playoff loss in June.

"The last game against Costa Rica, it was a very emotional game for him to play,” Svendsen told Stuff on Saturday. “Especially afterwards, I don't think that people know that, because Winston is a very private person, but that game meant the world to him.

“It was hard for him that we didn't qualify. After the game, me and him, we knew it was the end of his career, so we had a very special moment.”

Once Reid’s 33rd All Whites outing has finished – ideally, with a first win over Australia since 2002 – the national team won’t be able to call on a centre back with Premier League experience for the first time since 2004, when Ryan Nelsen joined Blackburn Rovers.

Reid came along at the perfect time to succeed Nelsen as a leader at the back, and the likes of Bill Tuiloma and Nando Pijnaker will have big shoes to fill as the All Whites turn their attention to qualifying for the 2026 World Cup in North America.

Reid hasn’t yet shut the door on returning to club football, an arena where his efforts to date are best summed up by the fact that West Ham legend Mark Noble included him at centre back in an “ultimate XI” of his team-mates as he approached his own retirement after 18 years and 550 appearances in the claret and blue last May.

The Kiwi made 192 appearances himself – 168 of them in the Premier League – and has his own place in Hammers folklore as the last player to score for the home team at the Boleyn Ground, the venue they left after more than a century of use in 2016, in a comeback win over English giants Manchester United.

On Saturday morning, Reid and his team-mates got a taste of the reception that awaits them on Sunday when they signed autographs and posed for photos in downtown Auckland, as young fans got to meet heroes they’ve only watched on TV (or played as on Fifa, the popular video game series).

There was a strong contingent of youngsters from the Takapuna club, where Reid took his first steps as a footballer as a youngster in the late 90s, and when Stuff surprised him with a copy of his team photo from 1998, he quipped: “Where’d you get that from? Have you been in my bedroom?”

More than two decades on, that picture helps tell the start of a story that will begin to end on Sunday afternoon. From Auckland to Denmark, then to England and back again, Reid has lived the kind of career many New Zealand footballers can only dream of and he will retire as an All Whites legend – and as a rare player to get a farewell match.

As he put it: “That I was lucky enough to play as a professional and an international for so many years – it’s amazing”.