Football Ferns at the 2018 Nations Cup: Game One vs Tonga
The Football Ferns didn’t roll up to the Oceania Nations Cup to take it easy. By the looks of their training camp and the general talk of good, good, good, good vibrations (and excitations) it sounds like the Ferns are beginning to get their mojo back… but the Nations Cup is a business excursion and Tom Sermanni’s first starting eleven proved as much.
Against what was always going to be an overmatched Tongan team, Sermanni went with pretty much his best available team. No Hannah Wilkinson or Amber Hearn up front obviously, they’re both out with injury and that meant a first game in ages with neither of them starting up front. Not that there was any shortage of creative players in this squad. Rosie White, Betsy Hassett, Sarah Gregorius and Annalie Longo all started this game. Katie Bowen and Ria Percival took care of midfield duties. A predictable enough back four of (right to left): CJ Bott, Rebekah Stott, Meikayla Moore and Ali Riley. Then a carefree day in goal for Erin Nayler. Heaps of experience in that XI. Heaps of goals too.
It’s not really fair to compare the players who started this game and the players who started Andreas Heraf’s last game in charge, but it is kinda interesting in hindsight. Because that team wasn’t actually all that defensive in its personnel. Wilkinson and Hearn both started. White, Hassett and Gregorius too. Of course there was a back five that day but the team was also without its two best defensive midfielders – Ria Percival who was injured and Katie Bowen who was inexplicably left on the bench. Not just the defensive shape that grinded that day but the tonedeaf use of attacking players in that defensive shape… another example of a bloke who didn’t really get what he was working with.
Don’t wanna go any further down the negative route though. Instead it’d be much more productive to take a peek at how the team shaped up, what tactics they employed and all that. Anyone who follows football in this country knows that how kiwi sides play against Oceania teams is not necessarily anything at all to do with how they play against other countries, only Anthony Hudson was ever silly enough to play the Nations Cup as if Aoteroa was the underdog, but that was a valuable insight into his thinking all the same. Just as there’d be clues about Tom Sermanni’s ideas from this game too.
But the thing is… the live stream wasn’t working. So we couldn’t watch the game. Instead we’ve gotta dine off what showed up in the highlights which, to be fair, are always of an excellent standard from Oceania Football and their live streams are generally top shelf as well so can’t complain that it was down for one game. Love that they put those FIFA dollars to good use, broadcasting games online at a high quality and in an accessible format. I’m sure there are other dollars that go missing, it’s still international football after all, but as fans we’re getting something good here and that’s worth acknowledging.
Yeah but no live stream on this occasion. Just know that it wasn’t much of a contest. Rosie White scored in the eighth minute to open the scoring, the Ferns having already started on the front foot, and Annalie Longo made it two about a minute later. Fifteen minutes played and both those two already had doubles (Rosie’s second was goal of the game for mine).
There are going to be a lot of goals in this tournament, it’s as strong a team as the Ferns have sent there in recent memory (probably because the Ferns, on the whole, have more depth and talent now than ever before). So with goals flying in it’s a good time for some of our top scorers to cash in on the stats. Rosie White, for example, a great goal scorer who hasn’t always played in goal scoring positions for club and country but who still deserves a better ratio than the 17 goals in 91 caps she had coming into this tournament. Shout out to her on a quick double to up the numbers.
Shout out too to Betsy Hassett who beat the offside trap twice in two minutes to bring her international tally to 10 goals later on in the first half. Hassett’s arguably taken a step down in club level after stints with the likes of Manchester City, Ajax and Wolfsburg… but with KR Reykjavik in Iceland she’s getting a lot more game time and just had a great season with them. Also on the hunt for goals was Sarah Gregorius. A double in the last ten minutes of the first half and then completing the hatty after the break moves her up to third all-time in scoring with 28 goals (from 86 games). Amber Hearn’s 54 are a long way out of reach for any of these players but Wendy Sharpe’s 34 in second place might just be attainable if she keeps up the hat-trick per game rate… might be a tad much to ask though. Still, she’s now three ahead of Hannah Wilkinson. Rosie White is up to fifth, edging ahead of Maureen Jacobson and Wendi Henderson’s 17 each (Henderson who is with the squad as an assistant to Sermanni at the mo’… and who’d possibly be in contention to replace him after the World Cup if he doesn’t stay on).
That, if you lost count, made it 8-0 at half-time. Safe to say it was an unassailable lead. Unless you want to act like a bunch of Australians and go out trying to score 20 then there wasn’t much more to be gained from going hundies the rest of the way, so Sermanni made all three of his allotted changes at half-time, introducing Katie Rood for Annalie Longo, Sarah Morton for Ali Riley and Grace Jale, on debut, for Rosie White. Gregorius got her third soon after, then Ria Percival made it ten with a sharp run on the end of a tricky set piece (smashed low across the goal from a shooting area) from Katie Bowen (who was involved in a lot of the goals from midfield, particularly with her crossing ability) and then Grace Jale smacked one in near the end for a goal on debut.
It’d be interesting to crunch some numbers and see what the difference in strike rates for players in this squad between OFC game and non-OFC games. Again to compare things to Anthony Hudson’s silliness, his All Whites team were mostly awful against non-OFC teams but a guy like Chris Wood you know is class because he scores goals against all opposition. Amber Hearn is in that category too, despite having certainly cashed in at Nations Cups in the past. But you’ve gotta cash in at these times. Scoring goals at World Cups and Olympics is bloody difficult, let alone scoring them in bulk.
11-0 in the end then. A decent old start to things… although the Ferns won 16-0 against Tonga in their first game in the 2014 edition of this competition, just for a little context there. Gregorius also scored a hatty on that day, just as White and Longo also got doubles. We can probably expect a similar scoreline on Wednesday against the Cook Islands, though Fiji will be tougher in the final game of the group stage, while Papua New Guinea and hosts New Caledonia are always tricky and are likely to be our opponents in the semis and the final. No reason to get carried away, one game at a time and all that.
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