Ben Waine's Journey to the World Cup: From Struggles to Success

Ben Waine was never meant to be here, not if you rewound the tape to a few months ago and pressed pause on a bleak afternoon at Port Vale. Out of the squad. Out of form. Out of the picture. A World Cup? It might as well have been on another planet.

“It has been a tough season. I'm not going to lie,” he told Sky Sports. There were stretches when he did not even make the bench. It hurt. It stung. It forced him to stop, strip things back and start again.

In the end, that exile became a turning point.

From the stands to the spotlight

Port Vale went down, but Waine’s own season refused to sink with them. In March, under the lights and pressure of an FA Cup tie against Sunderland, the 25-year-old New Zealander found the moment he had been training for in silence.

A loopy header, back across the goalkeeper. The winner. The kind of goal that lives in the memory of a club and a player.

“It made a tough season a little bit more bearable,” he said. Bearable, and something more than that. Proof that the work he had buried himself in away from the cameras was worth it.

Those hours came with individual coach Simon Ireland. Just the two of them, day after day, working on one or two finishes, nothing fancy, just repetition and detail. Technique. Composure. The same actions until they stopped being thoughts and became instincts.

He talks about it simply: finding “that composure, that finish that I could go to without thinking.” A striker’s safe place. While the season frayed around him, those sessions gave him structure and purpose. When he wasn’t playing, he was still progressing.

He knew why he was out there.

The Sunderland header, he says, came straight from that work. Not from a cone drill or a whiteboard, but from the visualisation that followed him home. He pictured that exact goal. The arc. The angle. The ball drifting back across the keeper. When the cross came in, his body already knew what to do.

“It was really cool to see that come off,” he said. Cool, and career-changing.

A Shearer salute and a sense of belonging

The celebration said everything. Waine, whose family are Newcastle supporters, wheeled away and threw out the classic Alan Shearer arm in front of the travelling Sunderland fans. A cheeky nod to his roots, delivered in the most hostile corner of the ground.

“It was just awesome. I had never seen the stadium like that before. It was absolutely bouncing,” he remembered.

That goal was one of eight for Port Vale, a solid return that underlined how far he had come from those empty Saturdays. More than the numbers, it was the feeling. “I actually enjoyed playing my football again,” he admitted. It sounds basic. It isn’t. For a player who had uprooted his life to chase the English game, enjoyment had gone missing.

Waine had arrived from Wellington Phoenix to Plymouth Argyle in January 2023, stepping into League One with a reputation and a point to prove. The jump, he quickly discovered, was not about stepovers or first touch. It was intensity. It was physicality. It was the relentlessness of English football.

“I knew the jump to League One would be big. Not technically, but in terms of intensity and physicality, the adjustment was massive,” he said.

Then Plymouth went up. Championship football. Bigger grounds, better defenders, no time to breathe. “It almost came too quickly,” he admitted. There were flashes – a couple of goals at that level, including one at Elland Road against Leeds United – but not enough minutes to truly settle.

A loan to Mansfield was supposed to fix that. It didn’t. “That just did not work out at all.” No rhythm, no run of games, no platform.

The easy call would have been to go home.

He refused.

“I promised myself that however hard it got I was not going to go back. That would have been the easy option. I stuck it out and have come out of it as a better player and a better person.”

That stubbornness, that refusal to turn back, now carries him into a World Cup.

All Whites, higher stakes

Waine is no stranger to big stages. Two Olympic Games with New Zealand have already put him in front of full houses and fierce opponents. “France in the Velodrome was an awesome game to be a part of,” he recalled. Even so, he knows this is different. This is the World Cup. Another level entirely.

New Zealand’s build-up has underlined that. A 4-1 win over Chile in March, with Waine on the scoresheet, showed what they can do. The other results have shown the reality of the climb: defeats to Colombia, Ecuador, Finland, Haiti and England. Each match a reminder of the gap they are trying to close.

“You have to realise that when we are stepping up and playing harder opposition, we cannot expect the results to be perfect,” Waine said. The shift has been as much mental as tactical. Accept the struggle. Learn from it. Don’t panic.

There may be another adjustment coming for him personally. Waine calls himself “a running nine” – a forward who presses, stretches defences, runs in behind. But New Zealand already have their number nine, and he is the most decorated player the country has produced.

Chris Wood is immovable.

So Waine has had to bend. His time at Port Vale has seen him pulled out wide, to the left, to the right, asked to find different angles and new ways into the box. At first, he hesitated. Now, he sees it as a gift.

“It just felt really natural,” he said. “I am actually playing on the left, on the right and down the middle now. It adds another dynamic, which should help my case.”

There will be no talk of dislodging Wood. That is not the battle. The battle is to be on the pitch with him, to complement him, to give New Zealand another threat.

From Wood, Waine has taken something more subtle than a movement pattern or a finishing drill. Patience.

“As a striker, you can barely touch the ball all game but when that one chance comes, you had better take it. He has proven time and time again that he can do that.”

One chance on the world stage

One chance. That is the phrase that keeps coming back.

“There is going to be that opportunity to be the hero. You just want that one moment,” Waine said.

New Zealand open against Iran, then face Egypt and Belgium. On paper, it is daunting. On the training ground, it feels like a window. No one expects them to dominate. They do see a route, though.

“My first thought was that we have actually got a chance here. Everyone sees us as underdogs but we want to take the opportunity that is in front of us. We want to get our first win on the world stage and we want to get out of the group for the first time ever.”

Mohamed Salah’s shirt? Waine laughs that others will “pull rank” for that souvenir. He might leave with something better. A memory that follows him forever. A goal that kids in Wellington and Port Vale replay on their phones. Maybe even another Shearer salute, arm raised, head high.

“Maybe it will reappear,” he said, still smiling at the thought.

Strip it all back and the mission is simple. He wants to “squeeze the most out of my potential.” That is what dragged him through the lonely training sessions, the failed loan, the weekends in the stands. That is what has delivered him to the edge of a World Cup with real belief.

Now it comes down to the moment he has been visualising his whole life.

When that one chance finally drops, can Ben Waine make it feel as natural as that header against Sunderland?