Anthony Hudson is Right About Football in New Zealand, You Know
Over the weekend, the coach of the New Zealand national football team spoke to some newspaper and went on some radio programme and blasted the state of the game in the country in which he is employed. The newspaper was a Sunday tabloid. Dunno who the radio interviewer was, some bloke called Beach or Vents or Wretch or something. I’d never heard of him before, though he does seem to have a whole lot of stories all about himself and his interactions with famous people. Maybe he’s married to someone important?
Anyway, I could never bare to sit through that kind of thing so I didn’t listen to the interview. Nor will I do so now out of journalistic integrity because frankly I don’t wanna. However I did happen to read the article and what I read was pretty shocking.
Basically, he’s laid into NZ Football for being stupid and disorganised as well as taking a sawed-off shotgun to footy culture in this country. And while it does seem rich coming from a dude who, with his position, is effectively the face of NZ Football, it also happens that pretty much everything that he said is true.
"We need a big shift in how we do things here in terms of professionalism”
Anthony Hudson took over in August 2014 and only just recorded his first win. The country has plummeted in the FIFA Rankings (admittedly a wonky yardstick) while handing out international caps to anyone who can afford a pair of pretty looking Adidas’ or Nikes. Guys have been playing for this team that don’t even have professional experience, it’s no question that Hudson has been too loose with trying to expand the playing group. But then he had to do something because we weren’t going anywhere fast from where Ricki Herbert left off.
"When I came in I had to rebuild the team. We've had so many debutants, 15 or 16 debutants and it's really not good, it's not right, it's far too many in six games but that's just a reflection of where we are.”
That makes enough sense to where we’d have excused him had the results been better, though maybe they will be from now on. Monkey off the back, progress, all that stuff. Of course there’s going to be a settling in period for a new coach with fresh ideas, especially when he's consistently working with understrength squads thanks to the difficulties of prying the best players from their clubs. That’s the nature of international football when the bulk of your squad is being picked from other continents. Which makes you wonder why they aren’t playing more games then. If it takes five games to get some sign of evolution then you’d wanna play those five games nice and quick, wouldn’t you?
"There is a FIFA window in March and still we don't know who we are playing so we can't plan, we can't prepare.”
The feeling has been that Hudson and his AFC experience has been behind the constant fixtures against Asian teams but then he’s not the one on the phone making the bookings, right? … Right? Asian teams are a lot closer than European or African teams so that’s just convenience, though I don’t see any countries scheduled to play in New Zealand any time soon. According to Hudson there is no shortage of teams happy to play us so presumably a few would be willing to make the trek down here, except that still isn’t happening. You can only assume that money is behind this, because what else can it be? Penance for a long suffering fan base? Yeah because God knows that NZ Football doesn’t owe the average kiwi punter any reconciliation...
"If you're not playing games while other teams are playing games then yeah, you're going backwards. We can't escape this. There's no magic wand. The only way to develop your team is to play games."
Well that’s where the problems begin and that’s what Hudson’s recent comments are getting at. With any coach there are expected problems and it is his job, the players’ job and the administration’s job to work through those problems and find healthy solutions. That’s what they call doing business. But in this country we have a governing football body that is so embarrassingly inept that they allowed not just one but “eight or nine players” to play despite being ineligible to represent this country. I’m sorry but that is not excusable under any circumstances. That is a capitulation of competence. Almost every one of those players has since been granted compensation by FIFA basically on the grounds that we asked nicely which makes this all the more outrageous: it was so goddamn easy to fix! I mean, if they’d gone about bribing and manipulating the system then at least it would have been in keeping with FIFA’s own reputation, might have even gathered a bit of Wise Guy respect from Blatter’s Boys, but this seems to have been nothing but plain and simple uselessness. Worst of all, so far only Fred De Jong (former Director of High Performance for NZF) has fallen on his sword because of it - so we’d better bloody hope that the rest of them have learned their lessons in not being absolute hacks. And even Freddie can still be heard yapping away as the colour commentator on Wellington Phoenix broadcasts most weeks.
"It is horrific in this country... but I am almost a lone voice in sharing this. No-one wants to upset anyone here, no-one wants to make people accountable, everyone wants to keep everyone happy.”
This is exactly it. Hudson needs to be allowed to make mistakes and recover because that is his job as a manager. The admin, meanwhile, needs to run as smoothly and operational as possible so that he has the room to do his job properly. There is not a single example in world sport where a team can compete at its best despite being handicapped by organisational muppetry. The most shocking thing about this is that these are his employers that he’s going at. Employers that lived up to every bit of Hudson’s criticism with the final line in the article(s*), which read: “New Zealand Football chief executive Andy Martin was on holiday and could not be reached for comment.” Sounds about right.
"It's a soft, laid-back environment. It's an epidemic here."
Usually when someone goes after their employers like that it’s a dramatic way of handing in their notice. Take this job and shove it. But I don’t believe that in this case, even before Hudson clarified that wasn’t his intent. I think he knows that he’s in a privileged position and that NZF really can’t afford to sack him, literally or figuratively, and this is how you exploit that power and use it beneficially. Sure, he could have taken the ‘Quick word in your office, Mr Martin?’ approach but he knew that wouldn’t get anything done. Maybe a screwed-up memo in a waste paper basket. This is Hudson publically shaming his bosses into action. This is Hudson trying to do something about a sport in this country that is so used to being under regarded that it barely even cares.
"I've met a handful of players over this Christmas period and I've been horrified at what I've seen and heard."
Not only in the boardrooms but also on fields across the country. Fields that are often poorly kept because the local decision makers consider football a poor cousin to the likes of rugby and cricket. The latest fad is artificial pitches, which make for a great gimmick but only as a ‘once or twice a season’ sorta thing. Football’s not the same on turf and it shouldn’t be the target just because it sounds convenient in concept. Just ask the American Women’s team that tried to sue FIFA for putting their World Cup on turf last year. Rightly so, you want people to consider this a flagship event and you don’t even treat it that way yourselves? Bugger off then FIFA.
“These are all young players that haven't made it yet, but all have the ambition to make it. They are supposedly our best young players in New Zealand, yet they are so far removed from reality of how hard you have to work and what you have to put in, what you have to sacrifice.”
But when people talk about the Culture of the Sport, they aren’t only talking about those employed by it. That poison-tipped arrow is aimed firmly at Jerry and Jenny Football Fan. The accusation is that our young players are delusional about how close they are to the top, and why is that the case? Because our coaching system is made up of parents who live vicariously. Because our talent pool is swimming with players told they can go all the way just because daddy didn’t mind driving an extra thirty minutes to training to get them into a better team at a different club with higher fees. None of these people are aware of where the ceiling is because there’s no notion of it in a country that has only one professional team and hasn’t hosted an international match since May 2014 (a game vs South Africa that, by the way, was significantly responsible for getting both Jeremy Brockie and Michael Boxall contracts at SA clubs).
"There is no urgency and they've got people around them that tell them how good they are all the time. No-one keeps them accountable... it horrifies me.”
As it happens, Hudson is part of the problem in a way. There’s a deep set colonialism in football in New Zealand where battler Englishmen turn up and are suddenly positioned into high ranking coaching positions. Neil Emblem and Darren Bazeley came over to play as aging overseas pros and now both have coached national teams within the setup. However this whole thing goes way deeper than that, it goes all the way down to the grassroots. We’ve a fascination with foreign coaches and far too many of the local ones that care are too busy imagining themselves to be Brazilian or Spanish or German to ever come close to establishing something like a New Zealand style of footy. It’s an underlying inferiority complex that glares through the curtains in most aspects of this country (Average NZ interview: “Welcome to NZ, famous person! How are you enjoying our modest little country? Oh, please tell us you love it!”). It's there in pretty much everything except for rugby and film CGI.
"The footballing culture here is an epidemic and there is a real problem with the mentality of our coaches and players.”
The escape clause is clear. Get the hell outta this country. And I don’t mean that in a Donald Trump way, I mean that young players have got to know that you cannot make it by chilling in the Waitakere team ‘til you’re 25 or whatever. It’s tough because it’s an expensive decision, but you’ve gotta move to Europe in your teens if that’s really what you want. That’s the sacrifice. And I reckon that Mr Hudson will find that after players make a commitment to their career like that, the lazy Christmas breaks won’t be so common.
"I feel sorry for the players. There is no programme for them to visibly commit to. We are starting from the beginning every time we get together.”
Which brings us to the All Whites. By the sounds of what Hudson says, it’s all about as unprofessional as we might have expected. No wonder managers like Sam Allardyce and Mick McCarthy seem not to want to deal with us. We can develop all the players we want and still not have a decent national team if the gears aren’t all aligned.
"The players all want to know when we are playing. They are on me about it all the time. We need to be more prepared for them. We need things to be planned, their clubs need to know."
So good on Anthony Hudson. He’s a man that’s taken a fair bit of criticism in these parts before but even if he’s sacked tomorrow, he’s done a great service to football in New Zealand by holding the mirror up to our faces and saying ‘look closely’. For once, this isn’t about some foreigner coming in and telling us he’s better. This is about a man trying to do his job and continually being tripped up by the indifference of those around him and the incompetence of those above him. Keep preaching, son.
* (One pondering… I noticed the Sunday Star Times article (“Last updated 05:00, January 10”) and the NZ Herald article (“9:46 AM Sunday Jan 10) both ended with the same line about Andy Martin being away on holiday. Word for word, despite being of rival publishers. NZH used comments from Hudson’s IV with Tony Leech, while SST had seemingly direct quotes. Both were published on the same morning. Now, maybe the Herald used those extra couple hours to do some plagiarising but it seems extraordinarily unlikely that they also got a Leech interview done and dusted in that time. This strikes me as a coordinated press attack, with a press release and a small IV tour on Hudson’s part, which makes me wonder now… where the hell was our invite!?)