The Black Sticks women will play Chile for fifteenth place at the Hockey World Cup on Thursday night, and whatever happens in Wavre, New Zealand will record the worst finish in the team’s World Cup history.
The playoff was locked in on Monday when New Zealand lost 2-1 to Scotland in the last of their classification matches. Brittany Wang put New Zealand ahead with a field goal in the 23rd minute, Fiona Burnet levelled three minutes later, and Heather McEwan won it for Scotland from a penalty corner in the 45th, according to the official match report from the International Hockey Federation.
That leaves the Black Sticks women without a win from five matches at this tournament. They lost 5-2 to hosts Belgium, 3-2 to Ireland and 3-0 to Spain in pool play, drew 1-1 with the United States in the second round, then went down to Scotland. Six goals scored, fourteen conceded, one point on the board.
New Zealand have been to ten women’s World Cups. They finished fourth in Amsterdam in 1986, which remains their high water mark, and they have twice finished eleventh, in Perth in 2002 and in London in 2018. Fifteenth or sixteenth out of sixteen would sit well below anything the programme has produced before.
The men are in a very different position at the same tournament. New Zealand won their classification pool in Amstelveen with three wins from three, beating Wales 7-2 and then Pakistan 4-2 on Monday. Dylan Thomas scored inside the opening minute against Pakistan, Scott Boyde made it two in the 16th and George Baker added a third in the 22nd. Pakistan pulled two back from penalty corners either side of half time before Kane Russell settled it from a corner of his own in the 49th, the FIH report shows.
Greg Nicol’s side now meet Ireland in the ninth place match at midnight on Saturday morning, New Zealand time. Ninth would match what the men managed in 1986, 2002, 2010 and 2018. Their best remains seventh, achieved in 1973, 1975, 1982, 2014 and at the last World Cup in 2023.
Both teams came into the tournament off strong Nations Cup campaigns, the women taking silver and the men bronze, and both were pushed into the classification rounds by the same thing, which is the gap between them and the fully professional programmes at the top of the sport. New Zealand were beaten 5-1 by the Netherlands and 7-1 by Argentina in men’s pool play. The women drew Belgium, Spain and Ireland and did not win a game.
The reason that gap exists is not much of a secret, and Hockey New Zealand has been open about it. In a feature published by RNZ on 7 August, head of high performance Simon Brill described a deliberately decentralised set-up in which players train in their own regions and come together for about 70 days a year.
“We’re an amateur programme, we’re an amateur sport. The players have all sorts of different arrangements around their employment, their studying, some are at home, some have moved out, whatever,” Brill told RNZ.
“But it’s built around where they actually live, the regional environments, the individual ownership, and that world-class support. Nobody’s telling them to train here, they’ve got to sharpen, do this on their own.”
More than half the men’s squad and about 30 percent of the women’s squad live, train and work overseas. Defender Anna Crowley, who works as a teacher aide at Woodend School in Canterbury, told RNZ the real number of days together felt closer to between 41 and 53.
“So whenever we go away on tour, we literally meet at the airport and then fly out. We have probably three, four days of training or just getting used to where we are in the world, and then we get into game play,” Crowley said.
“It definitely does have its challenges, but the majority of us are pretty used to how things roll.”
The money behind all of this shifted sharply after Paris. High Performance Sport New Zealand cut Hockey New Zealand’s funding by $1.5 million after the women missed the 2024 Olympics and the men lost every match they played there, and hockey was then dropped from the reduced Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games programme. Competing in the Pro League, where the world’s top nine nations play each other regularly, costs roughly $750,000 a team, which acting chief executive Ken Maplesden told RNZ in June 2025 is now out of reach.
“The balancing act here is trying to make best use of the limited resources that we have and we want to prepare ourselves to perform at those pinnacle events,” Maplesden said.
There is a small irony in the identity of the team that knocked New Zealand into the bottom playoff. Scotland were invited to the Nations Cup in Auckland in June, the tournament the Black Sticks women used as their World Cup preparation, and withdrew on financial grounds. They then beat Ireland and New Zealand in the space of three days to finish second in the classification pool.
None of which takes much away from how the women got here. They qualified by beating Australia in the Oceania Cup decider in Darwin in September 2025, winning 5-4 on penalties after a late equaliser, with goalkeeper Grace O’Hanlon making the save that sent them through. It was the side’s first pinnacle event since the 2022 World Cup.
“It feels like something has been building for us for so long,” O’Hanlon said at the time. “We’ve had this grinding couple of years, and then at the Nations Cup we started to build.”
Head coach Phil Burrows named a squad in July that leaned young, and said as much when he did it. “This is still a relatively young and developing group internationally, which is exciting because there’s clearly a lot more growth ahead of them,” he said in the squad announcement.
Chile arrive at the fifteenth place match in similar shape, having lost all three of their second round matches. New Zealand and Chile start at 9pm on Thursday, New Zealand time. Full results for both squads are on the Black Sticks website.
What do you make of the way New Zealand funds and prepares its hockey teams? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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