The Race Is On For The Black Singlets At World Shears Champs

A mixture of title and selection series’ winners will be the six members of the New Zealand team for the 2023 World Shearing and Woolhandling Championships in Scotland.

The processes were decided last week by Shearing Sports New Zealand’s national committee annual meeting, on recommendations from its North and South island delegates’ meetings.

The winners of the Golden Shears Open Championship in Masterton on March 4 and the New Zealand Shears Open in Te Kuiti on April 1 will be automatic selections for the two machine shearing berths, but if the same shearer wins both events the second position will go to the NZ Shears runner-up.

The two woolhandlers will be the top two in the final of an eight-show national selection series, comprising four rounds in the North Island four in the South Island.

Rounds will be held at Waimate, Poverty Bay, Hawke’s Bay, Central Hawke’s Bay, Lumsden, Balclutha, Gore and Masterton, and finals will be at the Golden Shears.

The two blades shearers will be the top two in an eight-show series with events at the Waimate Shears, Rangiora, Ashburton, Christchurch, Reefton, Mayfield, Oxford and MacKenzie Shows.

The World Championships will be held on June 22-25 next year during the Royal Highland Show at Ingliston, Edinburgh.

The championships will be the 19th, the first having been for machine-shearing only in England in 1977, and a feature of the Edinburgh championships will be New Zealand’s attempt to regain supremacy in the machine shearing and the defence of its new No 1 acclaim in the blades events.

New Zealand has won the machine shearing individual and teams events double 10 times, but missed-out on both titles at the last championships three years ago in France, where New Zealand for the first time won the blades shearing double, highlighted by new international and Geraldine shearer Allan Oldfield’s breaking of an African stranglehold on the individual title.

While Sheree Alabaster, of Taihape, and Pagan Rimene, of Alexandra, won the woolhandling teams event in 2019, it was the third time in a row that New Zealand had not won the individual title at a World Championships abroad since Alabaster won in Norway in 2008.

Some big competition is expected in Scotland, especially in the machine shearing, with UK nations’ teams chosen during the current Northern Hemisphere season including defending individual champion Richard Jones, for Wales.

New Zealand gun, World nine-hours ewes shearing record-holder and now-established and award-winning Cornwall farmer Matt Smith is also in the England team, after winning the England championship final in June, and will be out to emulate brother and Hawke’s Bay shearer Rowland Smith’s winning of the title, in Ireland in 2014.

But 2012 individual champion, two-times teams champion and New Zealand-based Scottish shearer Gavin Mutch recently missed selection for what would otherwise have been an eighths championships representing Scotland in a row, dating back to 2005.

He won major titles the Royal Highland Open and the Scottish Blackface Championships in June, but was just third in Scotland team selection event the Scottish National Championship and did not enter the Scottish National Circuit which decided the second machine shearing position.

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