Marked for Ivan Stojkovic
From our football correspondent
Steady
Squad14 Sep 2026
Ivan Stojkovic damages knee ligaments — 17 days out
The words a physio says slowly. 17 days is what the club will announce and everybody who has heard this diagnosis before knows the number is the least of it: the knee comes back before the player does.
Market14 Sep 2026
“I have given everything here and I need a new challenge.” The request is formal, and the relationship will never be quite the same again.
Squad14 Sep 2026
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Ryan Cacace is 16, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Squad14 Sep 2026
Alex Lewis has improved at 24, which nobody expected
Careers are supposed to plateau and then decline, and the players who ignore that are always the ones who were listening on the training ground. 3 points of it, over months, at an age where the direction normally only goes one way.
Squad14 Sep 2026
Words at Hawke's Bay United training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Jacob Collins is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Steady
Squad7 Sep 2026
24 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Hawke's Bay United lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
Market7 Sep 2026
“I have given everything here and I need a new challenge.” The request is formal, and the relationship will never be quite the same again.
Market7 Sep 2026
The clubs have settled the fee and he has settled his wages. What remains is a medical and a photograph, and around Hawke's Bay United people have started saying his name in the past tense.
Boardroom7 Sep 2026
Deadline passes with 4 signed and 3 gone
That is the business done at Hawke's Bay United until the window opens again. Whether it was enough will be answered on Saturdays rather than in a column, and the first Saturday is close.
Squad7 Sep 2026
At 21 he is doing things this season that he could not do last season, and doing them every week. Form comes and goes; this has stayed long enough to be called something else.
Squad7 Sep 2026
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Mark Mason was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
From our football correspondent
Steady
Squad31 Aug 2026
A knee injury of the worst kind for Ivan Stojkovic
31 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Hawke's Bay United lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Market31 Aug 2026
Deklan Waine hands in a written request
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Hawke's Bay United can pretend not to have heard.
Squad31 Aug 2026
Mark Mason in a row with a teammate
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Hawke's Bay United this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad31 Aug 2026
Jacob Collins falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
The dugout31 Aug 2026
“Nobody here is above being told.” It was not said with a name attached, but the dressing room can count, and so can everybody who was listening.
Market31 Aug 2026
Every press conference now starts and ends the same way: with Dane Sutton’s future. The manager has run out of new ways to say nothing.