Football Brawl at Sunnynook Park: Consequences for Waitematā Player

On a winter afternoon at Sunnynook Park on Auckland’s North Shore, a Division 3 match between Waitematā FC and Albany United disintegrated into something far uglier than a local football scrap.

Court documents released this week lay out how it started.

The final whistle had gone. Around 3.30pm, Waitematā player Kumar ran up behind an Albany opponent and kicked his right foot, sending the player stumbling forward. Words flew. Tempers snapped.

Kumar then drove both hands into the player’s chest, hard enough to knock him backwards. That shove lit the fuse. A full-scale melee erupted between the two sides.

Dragged to the ground by another Albany player, Kumar briefly disappeared from the main tangle of bodies. Then he got up, spotted his original target standing off to the side of the fight, and charged.

He punched the player in the jaw. The victim crashed to the turf. Kumar, still in his boots, kicked him in the face.

Witnesses had to haul him away.

An Albany United player later told the Herald their side had been warned about Waitematā before the game. He called them “pretty scrappy” throughout a contest the referee eventually cut short, abandoning the match before the brawl could escalate further.

The victim, that player said, was the “smallest player on the pitch”. The attacker, he added, vanished before most people understood what had just happened.

“Doing that and then running off, it’s just a f***ing cowardly way to do it,” he said.

Inside Waitematā, the response was swift. Club president Conan McKinstry said last year that Kumar was “immediately removed from the club” and that officials had been co-operating with police.

“He’s not welcome back at the club,” McKinstry said.

A 10-week police investigation followed. Kumar was arrested one year ago this week.

He first faced a charge of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, an offence that carries a maximum of 14 years in prison. The consequences for the victim were serious: a broken jaw, surgery, and time off work to recover, according to court papers.

Kumar later pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of injuring with intent to injure, which has a maximum sentence of five years.

When the case reached sentencing this week, the man he attacked at Sunnynook Park did not come to court. No victim impact statement was read. The judge was told the player had no interest in a restorative justice conference, the kind of face-to-face meeting where an offender can apologise directly.

For a time, it looked as though Kumar was trying to pull himself out of the spiral. Judge Retzlaff noted he had begun a stopping violence programme and applied for a discharge without conviction. There were signs of “steady progress towards rehabilitation”.

Then came a violent relapse that, in the judge’s words, “unfortunately put a halt to that positive progress”.

Last month, around 4am, Kumar left a Kingsland bar and accepted a ride home with relatives. What happened in the car was laid out starkly in the documents.

He punched a male relative sitting beside him in the back seat. The driver pulled over. Kumar turned on a female relative, punching her twice in the face and dragging her out of the vehicle by her hair.

When the male victim demanded to know why, Kumar hit him again. The man fell to the ground. The attack continued.

Kumar ran, but police picked him up a short distance away. He initially denied assaulting his relatives. Asked about the football incident, he claimed self-defence.

His lawyer told the court Kumar is now ashamed of his “impulsive and violent behaviour” in both episodes, and that he has no memory of why he attacked his family members.

“He’s very remorseful for the harm he’s caused,” counsel Osborne said, while accepting that a short prison sentence was inevitable because Kumar had no suitable address for home detention.

The fallout stretches beyond jail time. A deportation notice has already been issued. Kumar wants to fight it, Osborne said, but the path to doing so will be difficult.

Judge Retzlaff settled on 18 months’ imprisonment. He urged Kumar to attack his own behaviour with the same intensity he had shown on others, to “redouble” efforts to rebuild his life once released, even if deportation rips him away from his family.

“The physical harm you caused is clear,” the judge said, adding that he had no doubt the first victim also suffered psychological harm from the on-field assault. “He should have been entitled to enjoy a soccer game without this happening to him.”

The Herald asked to photograph Kumar in the dock. The judge refused, pointing to Kumar’s lack of prior convictions, his youth, and what he described as “past experiences of trauma and violence that he himself experienced” at the hands of his father.

“You have not had a happy upbringing in certain seasons of your life,” Judge Retzlaff acknowledged.

Then came the warning that now hangs over whatever future Kumar has in football or beyond.

“You need to develop a mechanism to steer away from this violence, or it’s going to keep landing in prison.”