Nick Becker

They'd come last minute.

They'd sort of spent a lot of their own money and sort of celebrate with them, which was

which was amazing.

There's only probably 30 or 40 of them in the stadium at Coopers.

And that was an incredible moment.

And then Saturday to be watching it, just with a couple of mates to see that game, we're thinking Sydney had done it.

And then in the last minute, Eli scored for Newcastle and it was locked in at one all.

And then it went the whole way for Sydney.

We obviously wanted Sydney to win for the home final, but what an amazing semifinal both of them have been in both legs.

It's been an incredible final series.

I think there's always a lot of ingredients that go into kind of making something successful.

And I think right from the start where we worked really hard to be part of Auckland and embed ourselves into the community.

And I think that's paid us off dividends because we've always known we've had fantastic support.

I think we've got the best fans around.

in the league or in the country by a mile and to have that support so early on has been been super important and then you know the other thing that we said that we'll do right at start is be competitive from day one and be ambitious and want to win silverware i i think as an organization we we don't want to be there to make up the numbers we want to be there to to take home some trophies and so we won the premiership in our first season and

And then they got knocked out of the semi-final and decided it was season two would be the one that we go really hard to get that kind of championship.

And it sort of played out very well for us.

We're now in a first ever grand final.

Yeah, I think it's amazing.

We've had one team in Wellington that have done a fantastic job and we've got a fantastic rivalry against them.