Today’s Thirsty Whale Napier City Rovers Federation game against Gisborne Thistle marks the introduction of the Len "LJ" Cudd Memorial Trophy. 

The trophy, donated by Len’s wife, Irene, will now be a permanent feature of these fixtures, and up for grabs whenever the two teams meet.

LJ coached many Thistle sides and helped to foster some of Gisborne’s finest talent - one of those being his son, Jimmy Cudd.

Jimmy was an influential member of Napier City Rovers, captaining the side to previous National League and Chatham Cup successes.

 This taonga will commemorate all the success of Gisborne Thistle and Napier City Rovers, past and future.

Pictured inset, Lenn Cudd and his wife Irene.

Len Cudd had a sense of fair play that brooked no argument. His brother Robert was three years younger, so he got the extra player . . . their sister Catherine. Len wasn’t finished there. The game needed structure, control. He would be referee. Six decades after those front-yard football games in De Lautour Road, Gisborne, Robert Cudd recalled those days. 
“We used to come home on a Monday night after Salvation Army band practice – he played the euphonium, and I played the tenor horn – and our sister Catherine would be dragged outside to be goalkeeper.“
It was Catherine and me against Len, and the only help Catherine and I had was the lemon tree in the middle of the lawn . . . it used to take a hammering.” 
This regular practice session ended in 1962, when The Beatles came on the scene. 
“Len went to band practice with a Beatles hair-cut,” Robert said. “It was short, but it was brushed forward in the mop style.” 
After Len was admonished for sporting that new hairstyle, he and the Salvation Army parted company, and thereafter attendance by the rest of the family at church services dropped off. However, Len continued to support the Salvation Army through donations over the years. Len’s wife Irene said that years later the band member who led that reaction to Len’s Beatles haircut sought out Len’s mother Jean (nee Waugh) and apologised for the incident. Monday night games on the front lawn were canned, Len and Robert had to get their football fix elsewhere, and Catherine never played goalie again. 
Lennard James Cudd, known as Len or Lenny, was born on March 11, 1948, the middle child of five to Ted and Jean Cudd. Bonnie and Ralph were the elder siblings, Catherine and Robert the younger. The family lived in Grey Street and then De Lautour Road. Len attended Kaiti, Gisborne Intermediate and Gisborne Boys’ High schools. He made the Boys’ High first 11 in Form 4, and Robert said Len always played centre-forward. 
In 1966, player-coach Iain Gillies recruited Len for Eastern Union, the team for whom Len’s uncle Dave Waugh had played. Also in the team was a cousin, Jim McMillan, and they were teammates for most of their senior football careers. In 1966 at 18 years of age, Len was far and away Eastern Union’s top goalscorer, and was an automatic selection when the club entered its first outside league the following year. Eastern Union won the 1967 Central District League, and in 1968 the club changed its name to Gisborne City in time for its participation in the Central League that year. Around this time, Len met Irene Day. 
“Len’s sister Catherine and I were in the same class at school,” Irene said this week. “I was 18, Len was 19, and we saw a bit of each other.” 
But Irene had plans to go to Britain with a friend for their OE. They got as far as Brisbane. “Len wrote to me and asked me to come back,” Irene said. “His grandfather paid for my fare home.” They were married in 1970 and raised two daughters and a son – Teresa, Junita. and Jimmy. They also provided a loving home life for children and teenagers going through a difficult patch.

Len’s football career coincided with Gisborne City’s big push for membership of the national league, and with the early years of the new competition. A stream of imported players, mainly from Britain, had boosted the talent base of Gisborne football and added a touch of glamour to the team. They drew crowds away from home, too. Gisborne City were the only team from the provinces in the inaugural eight-club national league in 1970, and visits by the cream of New Zealand football talent every second Sunday made Childers Road Reserve the place to be at the weekend. Not everyone was thrilled at the arrival of British ex-professionals, taking places that could otherwise by filled by local players. Len made the best of it, fighting hard to keep his first-team place and learning what he could from the incomers. One of those British imports, goalkeeper Mick Locker, passed on a few fitness hints that Len found particularly useful when he coached age-group teams. Not blessed with outstanding speed, Len made the most of what he had. He worked hard in training, mastered shooting with either foot, perfected his heading technique, and in a match showed the courage of someone who “got stuck in”. After City were relegated from the national league in 1976, Len played for them in the Central League in ’77 and then retired from “serious” football – he was only 29. But that didn’t mean he was any less serious about the football he did play. In 1978 he was player-coach of the Gisborne Thistle side that finished second in Division 3 North of the Central League. It was the start of a new focus for Len’s passion for football – coaching. He went away to courses and came back with badges. Asked why someone with his football experience would bother going to courses, he would say: “I learn something at every one of them.” When his old mate Archie Gillies started a Marist team, Len helped out as player-coach. He was in charge for their one-year shot at Central League football, when they were runners-up in the 1982 Division 3 North competition. They voluntarily dropped back to local football the following year. Len coached Gisborne City for two periods a decade apart. The first was in the National League in 1991 and the second was in 2002 and 2003 in the Central League. The first spell finished before the end of the season; the team had narrowly escaped relegation the previous two years and their luck (and money) ran out in 1991 . . . they were relegated. Second time around, City finished third and fourth in the Central League in 2002 and 2003.
As Jimmy Cudd grew up, he had a full-time personal coach in dad Len. It started as soon as Jimmy could kick a ball, and practice was indoors and outdoors. Inside the house, they played a game where the ball was not allowed to stop; outside, Len planted two trees and hung two big old goalnets between them for shooting practice. Len insisted on every drill being done with both feet. He had been able to shoot with either foot, and the players he coached would do the same. As Jimmy rose through the grades, Len coached his school and representative teams. This meant that the care and attention Len lavished on his son’s football development overflowed to the other members of the team. Ross Nicholson, Tim Cook, Matt Smith, Nic Somerton and Jimmy were the core of a group that rose together through the grades and performed well above the norm for Poverty Bay teams. Cook had the added advantage of living two doors away from Len and Jimmy, and being able to get extra tuition. 
“Dad always had a massive push for ball work,” Jimmy said this week. “Even warming up, we’d have a ball each. He was big on getting your technique right . . . not just things like turns, but basics like passing. He’d break it down. A lot of kids who weren’t naturally gifted were taught those basics really well.
 “He was patient with young players. It was all about practising skills over and over. To a lot of people it would be boring, but we saw the end result. We were beating the Wellington and Auckland teams. We talked to other teams . . . they hated playing Poverty Bay because we were so good and so fit.” 
Kaiti Hill became bywords for Len Cudd fitness sessions. Dave Coomber was the manager for Len’s schoolboy rep teams, and was the perfect foil. Their mutual respect was such that when stand-in referee Dave sent off both Len (from the sideline) and Jimmy in one game, the friendship survived. Jimmy has fond memories of those years of age-group football, and of the lessons his father taught.
 “In football, the biggest thing he wanted me to do was run at players, and keep running at them. He’d say, ‘Don’t be predictable; if you make a mistake, don’t worry, keep going, keep doing it’. “One thing he didn’t like about the English Premier League was that it was all about passing; nobody would run at players.
 “In the school holidays before tournaments we’d all train together every day. That was the commitment Dad showed and he wanted his players to show it, too.” 
Four of that group – Matt Smith, Tim Cook, Ross Nicholson and Jimmy – made the New Zealand under-17 team, and Ross and Jimmy gained U20 honours.
 Jimmy recalled one tournament – an under-19 tourney in Napier – where the whole team stayed with Jimmy’s Aunty Catherine (the goalkeeper). Jimmy was 18 at the time, living in Auckland and playing for North Shore, but he played for Poverty Bay. The year before, he had played in the same tournament – as a guest player for Lower Hutt club Stop Out – and received the player-of-the-tournament award. Jimmy had been to Britain with the New Zealand under-17 team before both of those u19 tournaments, and Auckland members of the squad had got him interested in moving north. He chose his Auckland club after Len woke up one morning and told him he had had a dream in which he saw Jimmy wearing maroon – the colour of North Shore’s playing strip. After “seven or eight” years at North Shore under coaches Keith Garland and then the Rufer brothers Shane and Wynton, Jimmy joined Napier City Rovers, for “about 12” years of the Hawke’s Bay club’s most successful era. Spells at Taradale and Napier Marist followed, before Jimmy moved to Australia. After playing for “four or five” seasons in Perth, he restricted his football to annual outings at the Thailand Masters tournament. He still lives in Perth and is a glove-and-barrier lineman operating as a fly-in/fly-out worker.
 Len’s other sporting interest was softball. He, Robert, elder brother Ralph and cousin Jim McMillan got into it through Gisborne City winger Ron Robertson who, with administrator Peter Goldsbury, had revived the local competition. Len had four main jobs and he treated each as if it were a vocation. He completed a carpentry apprenticeship with Brian Emms and gained a reputation for being a perfectionist. The painters loved to follow him because they didn’t need to use filler on his joinery. He took pride in finishing jobs to a standard where fault-fixing return visits were unnecessary. Over time, he found it difficult to work to the standard he set himself at the pace desired on building sites. When a job as driver for the Mills Bakery truck run to Wairoa came up, he grabbed it. After Cyclone Bola in 1988, he was for a time the only driver to get his truck through. The grader drivers cleared a path for him. He would drop the bread on the Gisborne side of the river and a barge took it across. After 10 years delivering bread, Len trained as a prison officer. He and Irene had moved to Hawke’s Bay, and Len got himself fit enough to handle the rigorous physical tests set for trainee officers. Len knew the families of a lot of the prisoners, and they appreciated his straightforward yet respectful manner. But a year after he started at Hawke’s Bay Prison, the job he really wanted came up – caretaker at Taradale High School. It was primarily a maintenance role, where he could use his carpentry and handyman skills. 
“He loved that job,” Irene said. “He was there for 15 years, until he retired in March last year, at the age of 72.” 
Irene had retired from her job of giving secretarial support for a neurodevelopmental paediatrician in December the previous year, and they were free to roam. 
“Len was adamant he was coming back to Gisborne,” Irene said. “I think he knew something. He found out he had cancer in September. It was one of those where you don’t have symptoms.”
 Len died at home, among family, on April 26 at the age of 73. He is survived by Irene, his wife of 51 years, daughters Teresa and Junita, son Jimmy, 13 grandchildren and five great grandchildren.

 – by John Gillies
 

Article added: Saturday 22 April 2023