UNBELIEVABLE NEWS; Chris wood suddenly signs new contract deal with new club

Chris Wood is the superstar Kiwi footballer in the English Premier League who will spearhead the All Whites’ next charge to the world stage.

If you want to be a famous sport writer in New Zealand, you probably shouldn’t specialise in football.

The beautiful game usually takes a back seat here … but that could all be changing.

With two teams now in the Australian football league, vocal and growing crowds, and some fantastic players looking at forming the All Whites team ahead of next year’s World Cup, football is on the up.

And then there’s Chris Wood.

The New Zealand captain is making headlines in the UK as he helps his Nottingham Forest team make a push towards the top of the best competition in the world.

Today on The Detail we look at the player who, despite being the country’s second-highest paid athlete (after basketball’s Steven Adams) and having a huge profile in England, barely rates a mention on our sports pages.

That is, until last weekend, when he scored a hat-trick in his team’s 7-0 rout of Brighton.

He’s just re-signed for Forest for two years in spite of being 33 years old. Fans sing songs about him, and it’s unlikely he can wander down the road from his home unnoticed. A TikTok ditty (search up ‘if Chris Wood could, Chris Wood would’) has had radio airplay here and in the UK. Stadiums of fans shout “Chris Wood’s on fire” and the headlines write themselves when a man named Wood plays for Forest.

Recently he returned to New Zealand to play a game in Hamilton to what RNZ football correspondent Matthew Nash describes as a “fantastic reception”.

“You could see that there were a lot of kids there from clubs all over the Waikato, Bay of Plenty in particular.