Corey Webster will pull on the black singlet again this month, more than a year after a torn Achilles tendon ended his season and left the Tall Blacks wondering whether they had seen the last of one of their most decorated guards.
Basketball New Zealand named its 12-man squad on Tuesday for the fourth window of qualifying for the 2027 FIBA World Cup, and the 37-year-old Manawatu Jets guard is in it. Webster reached 100 games for New Zealand against the Philippines in February last year, and has not played a full international since. He ruptured the Achilles during the 2025 national league season and missed the rest of that campaign.
The Tall Blacks fly to the Philippines for two games, against Iran on Friday 28 August and Syria on Sunday 30 August, both tipping off at 6pm New Zealand time. Coverage is on Sky Sport and on ESPN through Disney+.
Webster is not the only familiar face returning. Flynn Cameron comes back after missing the last two windows, first because his Australian league club was in the finals and then because he spent time with the Portland Trail Blazers at the NBA Summer League. Cameron’s younger brother Tobias, who won the New Zealand national league title with the Southland Sharks this month, is also in the squad, as is Cairns Taipans centre Luca Yates.
That gives coach Judd Flavell two sets of brothers in the same team. Corey and Tai Webster line up alongside Flynn and Tobias Cameron, which Basketball New Zealand says is only the second time two sets of brothers have been named in the same Tall Blacks squad. The first was in 2019, when the Websters played World Cup qualifiers with Isaac and Dan Fotu.
Eight players carry over from the July window, which is the point Basketball New Zealand keeps making about this group. The names are starting to repeat. Shea Ili, Sam Mennenga, Sam Timmins, Sam Waardenburg, Jordan Ngatai, Reuben Te Rangi and Carlin Davison have all been part of the run that got New Zealand out of the first round of Asian qualifying.
Webster earned his way back in through the New Zealand league and then through a Tall Blacks Select side that beat China 84-77 in Guangdong. He led the scoring for a team of mostly untried players, seven of whom were getting their first taste of senior international basketball, and the group had held only a handful of trainings before the game.
Select coach Ben Sheat said the young side had tried to play the way the senior team plays. “We wanted to do our best to replicate the Tall Blacks style of play from the start and I think we did a great job of that,” he told Basketball New Zealand. Sheat said having Webster and Ngatai in camp mattered as much off the court as on it. “Both Corey and Jordan were massive on and off the court for us,” he said, adding that their willingness to lead from the front and the experience they brought to the group were both significant.
Ngatai, who has 97 caps of his own and is closing on a century, was blunt about what the younger players produced. “I’m proud of the young players on the team. They played very well tonight,” he said.
The qualifying picture is tighter than New Zealand’s recent form suggests. The second round of Asian qualifying has merged two first-round groups into a single Group E containing Australia, Iran, Jordan, New Zealand, the Philippines and Syria. By Basketball New Zealand’s count, Australia sit top and unbeaten on 12 points, Iran and Jordan are level on 11, and the Tall Blacks are a win outside third place, with the Philippines and Syria on eight points each.
Six games remain, spread across this window, another in November and a final one in February, with the round running through to March. Under the FIBA qualifying format, the top three from each of the two second-round groups go through to the World Cup, along with the best fourth-placed team across both groups. Qatar hosts the tournament in 2027 and qualifies automatically.
So the maths is manageable but not forgiving. Two wins in the Philippines would put New Zealand in a strong position with four games left. Two losses would leave them chasing Iran and Jordan into the back half of the campaign, and relying on the fourth-place safety net that only one team in the whole region gets to use.
New Zealand went into this window on the back of four straight qualifying wins. The July window in Auckland delivered a double overtime win over the Philippines and then a 129-75 hammering of Guam at Eventfinda Stadium, a game in which Mennenga scored 27 points from 15 shots, Taine Murray made seven three-pointers on his way to 25 and Davison was perfect from the floor for 16. Murray and Taylor Britt, who played his 50th game in that Guam match, both miss this window.
Iran will be a different proposition from Guam. They are one of the most consistent programmes in Asian basketball and are chasing the same three qualifying places New Zealand wants. Syria sit below the Tall Blacks on points but have shown they can trouble teams that treat them as a soft fixture.
Flavell’s staff for the window includes assistant coaches Mike Fitchett and Matt Lacey. The squad is a mix of players from the Australian league, the New Zealand league, Japan and France, with Tai Webster contracted to Limoges and Ngatai now playing for Tauranga Whai after nearly a hundred appearances in black.
For Corey Webster, the numbers matter less than the fact he is on the plane. An Achilles rupture at 36 is the sort of injury that finishes careers, particularly for guards who rely on a first step. He spent a season getting back, played his way through a domestic campaign, then led a scratch national side to a win over China. Whatever happens in Manila, he has already done the hard part.
Are you following the Tall Blacks through this qualifying campaign, and do you think they will make it to Qatar? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think.
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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