Cambridge

Chris Wood signed for Nottingham Forest and captained New Zealand in the Premier League, but before any of that he was a teenager pulling on the shirt at John Kerkhof Park, where Cambridge FC gave him three seasons between 2003 and 2006. The club has never traded on that connection loudly; it simply happened to be where he started.

Cambridge FC has been playing in the Waikato town since 1948, long enough that the reason for its colours has outlasted most memory of the man behind them: first president Vic Butler supported Arsenal, and red and white stuck. The club is still known locally as the Cambridge Reds.

Success has come in patches rather than in a settled run. The WaiBOP Premiership was won in 2015 and again in 2017, the year the club also took the WaiBOP Championship, and smaller regional silverware — the Waikato Cup, the Waikato Plate, the Waikato Women's Cup — has been added across other seasons. The Chatham Cup, New Zealand's oldest football competition, has been a harder puzzle: Cambridge has reached the third round on twelve occasions without ever lifting the trophy itself.

The fixture that still matters most to the town is against Te Awamutu AFC, a meeting known as the Battle of Waipā, named for the district the two clubs share.

On the women's side, Katie Duncan went from Cambridge into 122 caps for the Football Ferns, a number few New Zealand players of either code ever reach, and her path started on the same ground where Wood's did — 1,200 capacity, half of it seated, a small stand for two international careers.