Wood seeks lucky break « Express & Star

Wood seeks lucky break

Albion teenager Chris Wood is hoping for a change of luck as he tries to fire New Zealand to the World Cup this week.

The 17-year-old will be in the All Whites’ squad to take on Bahrain in Wellington in the second leg of their play-off for a place in next summer’s finals. And Wood is looking to banish memories of the goalless first leg, when he had a goal disallowed for offside.

He said: “It would a major feeling to score the winning goal in our home stadium. We drew the first game but there’s a really strong buzz around New Zealand at the moment.

“The game has been sold out for weeks and we know that it’s a chance for us to put football on the map properly.

“We’ve got a good set of players, a good coach in Ricki Herbert and I’m confident we can get the result we need against Bahrain.”

Wood believes he was hard done by with his disallowed strike in the opening leg but he is looking forward to banishing the memory in front of a sell-out crowd of 37,000 on Saturday.

“To my mind, I was clearly onside,” he said. “The way the linesman would have taken it, he would have seen me and not the guy I saw on the far side. I was probably blocking him on my side.

“I turned to the right after scoring and saw the flag. It’s not the best feeling but you have to get on with it. It would have been nice to score, but it just didn’t happen.”

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This article was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 12:44 pm.