So What Are We Looking For From The All Whites at the Intercontinental Cup?
The All Whites are taking what’s effectively a second-string squad to a tournament in which they’re the lowest ranked team… but how would you react to the suggestion that the All Whites should beat all three of these teams over in Mumbai?
There is plenty that we can gain from this so-called Intercontinental Cup. The squad announcement article therein required a lot of defending of the selection policy and the point I tried to keep coming back to was that this is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for these players to give their international careers a boost, it’s an opportunity for a few specific players to get some serious game time in, it’s an opportunity for Fritz Schmid to lay the foundations of what he wants this team to play like going forward and it’s an opportunity, possibly most of all, to win some rare games of football.
Anthony Hudson’s record as All Whites manager looked almost decent until you split it between Oceania and non-Oceania teams. If you read TNC then you’ve heard this yarn before many times. Huddo won a single game from 16 attempts against non-OFC teams, with four draws and 11 defeats, scoring eight goals and conceding 24. Schmiddy, meanwhile, got off to a frustrating start with that 1-0 defeat to Canada but he can immediately get himself ahead of the pace-setter with a few good Ws in India. That’d be pretty sweet, right?
And they’re winnable games too. The FIFA rankings aren’t very generous to the All Whites, who linger way back in 133rd overall as of the most recent tallying. Chinese Taipei are at 121, Kenya are 111st and India are chilling in the top hundy at 97th in the world. But the FIFA Rankings are massively flawed and one of the reasons that the All Whites are so low is that, being from the weakest conference, they never get to play teams in this ability range and tack on points. We beat teams worse and don’t get much credit for it and then we lose to teams better and don’t get much credit for it. Then we don’t play at all in between.
The Elo Rankings are acknowledged to be a better indication of things and they offer us this context: New Zealand (80), Kenya (118), India (171) & Chinese Taipei (192), which is more logical in terms of what to expect. But the FIFA Rankings, for better and mostly worse, are the ones that everyone looks at and if they win damn some games, the All Whites will take a big leap. Take a big leap and better teams will be wanting to play them. It’s kind of an undercover crucial thing to get some results here.
Don’t forget that Kenya are rolling into town without Victor Wanyama, who is resting up after an injury plagued season with Tottenham. McDonald Mariga, their next best player, is also nowhere to be seen. And having just played a couple friendlies in preparation for this, local giants Gor Mahia have recalled half a dozen players because of a clash with the Kenyan club season. They lost 1-0 to Swaziland and beat Equatorial Guinea 1-0 last week, both at home, and now they’re away with a weaker squad. So don’t start with those excuses about Chris Wood not being there.
Chinese Taipei will have a domestically based squad and that’s nothing to fear, not if the All Whites are clicking. India will be a tougher task and probably the most difficult of the three on account of home advantage and a more established team. Manager Stephen Constantine, an Englishman, has been in charge since the start of 2015, having also previously coached the Indian national team for a few years earlier in the millennium. He’s been winning games too, albeit against weak opposition. He’s got a supposedly impressive goalie in Gurpreet Singh Sandhu, with veteran Sunil Chhetri leading the line. Their midfield is extremely youthful but then so is everybody else’s at this tournament.
But that’s still a squad pulled entirely from a relatively sheltered Indian domestic league. A domestic league that is on the rise and which has noticeably improved the standard of footy in that country… but with a heavy foreign influence that hasn’t quite given local players much priority. The All Whites are rocking up without something like seventeen players from a genuinely full-strength team and yet here still are players playing professionally across the world, mostly in England and Australia. Young players with their best years, and best employment, ahead of them.
Which comes back to the team itself and what to expect. Schmiddy fancied a flat back four against Canada which he shaped in a 4-2-3-1 formation. Seven of those eleven starters are on this tour, so expect to see a fair bit of Crocombe, Mitchell, Brotherton, Doyle, Payne, Howieson and Lewis here. There’s going to be a strong influence from players based at the Wellington Phoenix and in the NZ Premiership, which means there will be a battler element that we don’t usually see from the All Whites, though that ought to at least mean a good platform of structure and defence.
However we’ve still got a couple players capable of transcending that. Myer Bevan is the main one, a genuine goal-scorer who has achieved beyond his level pretty much his whole career. He scored buckets for the Nike Academy and was NZ’s best player at the last U20 World Cup, hands down. He won a contract with the Vancouver Whitecaps and managed to turn that into an MLS deal in a short amount of time, despite not doing a whole lot for the reserves, clearly they saw something that they liked. He’s currently on loan in Sweden which was a strange decision (they didn’t have to give him an MLS contract if they didn’t want him, so it must be about development and protecting their international roster spots). Bevan should be the starting centre-forward and we need him hitting the back of that net on the regular. He’s more than capable of exactly that.
Then there’s Clayton Lewis, one of the few players remaining from the World Cup qualifiers against Peru. He had a very solid Confederations Cup but hasn’t played much for Scunthorpe since signing there. This is where he gets to show the improvements that he’s made, building some form to take into preseason. He’s got vision and creativity and experience beyond his years. Sarpreet Singh, Jai Ingham and Andre De Jong should ensure there’s enough going on in those attacking areas to score a few goals. It’s the midfield that’s the biggest question mark (as usual) although Howieson and Payne were pretty good against Canada and Matt Ridenton has emerged to add to those stocks.
At a guess, that opening XI is going to feature Max Crocombe in goal with a back four of Dane Ingham, Adam Mitchell, Sam Brotherton and Tom Doyle with Tim Payne and Cam Howieson holding midfield and Singh, Lewis and Ridenton ahead of them. Myer Bevan up top. But who really knows? Potentially four games in ten days means there’ll be a heap of rotation, so keep an eye on how Schmiddy uses the full depth of his squad.
Other than that it’s all up for grabs. Don’t really wanna be dropping demands on the new gaffer this quickly when everyone deserves a Honeymoon period. Win some games, lay down some team foundations, give this young squad some freedom to learn and most of all win some games. Seems fair enough. But mostly win some games because we don’t get a lot of chances to do that against teams like these so definitely gotta win some games. Cheers, Schmidy. Thanks for reading.
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