Sumner to travel a familiar soccer road

Press, 21 January 1982, Page 28

Sumner to travel a familiar soccer road

The New Zealand World Cup soccer captain, Steve Sumner, will leave Christchurch today on a journey familiar to this country’s top players. Sumner is bound for Australia, where he will spend the next eight months playing in the Philips professional national league. The midfielder, aged 26, has signed for West Adelaide, where he will join a former New Zealand captain, Alan Vest, and one of his national team-mates from Christchurch, Allan Boath. While Sumner is looking forward to his new job at Adelaide, he admits that the trend for leading players here to head for overseas leagues is not a good thing for New Zealand soccer. “If they want a better standard of football here they have got to stop players leaving,” he said.

“But if someone wants to

make money out of the game right now, they have got to go overseas.” Sumner says he has sympathy for supporters here who cannot see the “stars” in action because they have drifted away from New Zealand’s home league. Included in that list of top players now are two World Cup representatives, Ricki Herbert and Wynton Rufer, who are set for seasons in England; Herbert with Southhampton and Rufer with Norwich City. The way to keep New Zealand’s best at home is to make the soccer set-up here more professional, Sumner says.

“I have heard the suggestion from Auckland that they should try to get two' or three players full-time (with national league clubs). “If that were possible that would be great — not just for people like me but for

young lads coming along who would think, if they worked a bit harder, they could make a full-time career out of playing football.”

Sumner said as well as playing soccer, the professionals could go out during the day and do things such as coaching at schools. Installing that sort of framework in New Zealand would mean an injection of money, but a couple of schemes have already been put forward to the Kiwi

skipper along similar lines, which, he says, he cannot disclose at the moment.

“But it may be that I will be back here next year,” he said. “It depends on whether things come off.” In the meantime Sumner is aiming simply to “impress” at West Adelaide. “They don’t know me at all down there,” he said. “With Newcastle last year I was injured for one game in Adelaide and for the other I was on World Cup duty. “But it is a new ball game for me and I am quite excited about it.”

Although Sumner has yet to have any dates confirmed, his next appearance in New Zealand is likely to be early next month, when the World Cup team meets fellow-qual-ifiers, Hungary, in Auckland and Christchurch. Following that, he will be returning to training with the national side in May.