The Warriors have locked in one of the form forwards of the 2026 NRL season, confirming on Wednesday that front-rower Jackson Ford has extended his contract with the club by a further two years through to the end of 2029.
The 28-year-old was not on the field when the news landed. Ford has been sidelined since June with a torn pectoral muscle, an injury that ended what had been the best run of football of his career and cut short a genuine tilt at the game’s highest individual honour. That the club moved to extend him anyway says a good deal about how highly he is rated inside Mount Smart.
Ford spent the opening months of the season at the top of the Dally M Medal standings, an unusual place for a middle forward to sit. He was leading his team in tackles and running metres and was among the competition’s leaders for post-contact metres. When the voting went behind closed doors at the midway point of the season he was three points behind Penrith halfback Nathan Cleary, according to reporting by the NZ Herald.
The injury arrived without warning. Ford was forced off roughly 20 minutes into the Warriors’ 38-20 win over the North Queensland Cowboys in Christchurch and was subsequently ruled out for 10 to 12 weeks, ending both his Dally M campaign and any prospect of a State of Origin call-up. He is now expected back in time for the finals series in September.
Coach Andrew Webster made no attempt to play down what the club thinks of him. Speaking to RNZ, Webster said Ford “was in the form of his life in the first half of the season” and that the club had signed him on the strength of exactly the qualities he has since displayed. “We could see he had a massive motor and he worked really hard,” Webster said. “He has proved that over and over ever since he came here.”
Webster went further, telling RNZ that “you’re not meant to have favourites, but he’s one of our favourites”, and adding that there are not many front-rowers who play the way Ford does. His teammates offered a similar assessment. Lock Erin Clark told RNZ that Ford “doesn’t play for the credit, he just wants to be the player you want to play with”, describing him as a true professional in the way he prepares.
Ford’s path to becoming a first-choice middle forward at an NRL club was not a direct one. Born in Shellharbour on the New South Wales south coast and a junior at the Gerringong Lions, he made his first-grade debut for St George Illawarra against the Gold Coast Titans in 2019 but never established himself as a regular starter, playing 33 matches across four seasons with the Dragons before signing with the Warriors in September 2022.
He arrived in Auckland in 2023 as a back-rower and spent his first two seasons largely in that role. The shift into the middle of the park came in 2025, and it has proved to be the making of him. Front-rowers are typically rotated off the field in the first half to manage their workload, which is what makes a prop capable of playing the full 80 minutes so valuable. It frees a coach to spend interchanges elsewhere, on the bench hooker, on an extra edge forward, or on covering an injury, rather than on the routine business of resting a starting prop.
That is a tactical advantage worth more than it sounds, and it goes some way to explaining why the club has committed to Ford for another two seasons beyond his existing deal. He had already signed an extension in late 2024 that ran through to the end of 2027. The new agreement takes him to the end of 2029, by which point he will be 31.
The extension comes at a point in the season when the Warriors have plenty to play for. They sit third on the NRL ladder after 22 rounds with 13 wins from 19 matches and a points differential of plus 226, level on 32 competition points with fourth-placed Cronulla and within touching distance of Sydney Roosters on 34 and competition leaders Penrith on 36, according to Rugby League Project. It is the club’s strongest ladder position at this stage of a season in some years, and a marked improvement on 2025, when the Warriors finished sixth and were knocked out by Penrith in the opening week of the finals.
They arrive at this week’s fixture in good touch, having beaten the Gold Coast Titans 42-6 in round 22 in what was their most emphatic win of the year. Next up is the sternest possible test. The Warriors host Penrith at Go Media Stadium on Friday 7 August with kick-off at 8pm, a match that pits third against first and offers a useful gauge of how the side is likely to fare once the finals begin.
For Ford, the immediate task is rehabilitation rather than selection. But the timing of the announcement, made while he is still working his way back from a significant injury, is a straightforward statement of confidence from a club that has watched him turn himself from a squad player into one of the more difficult forwards in the competition to plan against.
What do you make of the Warriors’ decision to lock in Jackson Ford until 2029, and how do you rate their chances of going deep into the finals this year? Leave a comment below and let us know.
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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