Turns Out There Will Be No All Whites Games in 2020 After All
The theme of this article is the ones that got away for New Zealand Football. No shortage of those out there, it’s not an easy thing to try and compete in a global sport when you’re isolated on the other side of the world (although it helps when tackling a pandemic). But this week has offered up a few more such tales than usual, tales which might not ordinarily qualify for write-up status. Yet put together... yeah might as well.
Ladies first and although she’s no longer eligible to play for New Zealand it was still very cool to see Maya Hahn signing with Bundesliga club SV Meppen this week. Hahn is a dual national who was a part of the kiwi U17 World Cup third-placers a couple years back... though as a creative midfielder in a team that generally set up quite defensively she didn’t really have the role she’d have wanted there and with the opportunity to get involved with the German system she ultimately chose that path instead. Not ideal for the Footy Ferns who are in desperate need of her type of creativity... but can’t exactly fault the decision making. Germany offers way more opportunities at both club and international level, in styles of play that better complement and challenge her. NZF had their chance and blew it by seemingly failing to give the right assurances when they still could. Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered. Who knows. So it goes.
SV Meppen are a newly promoted side and other than a few clubs battling relegation at the bottom, the gap between the second tier and the top tier in German women’s footy is a daunting one. Hence picking up a current German U20 international like Maya Hahn is rather useful... her U20s teammate Laura Sieger also plays for SVM. Hopefully there are plenty of minutes on offer at a club like this and she’s also got a German U20s camp upcoming with a pair of games against France next week.
Meppens Sports Director Maria Reisinger: “The workloads have become even greater for the players with the promotion, so we would do well to have multiple players in each position in order to create opportunities to rest players, but also at the same time to increase our variety. [Maya] is young, has great potential and fits in very well with our philosophy. We will have a lot of fun with Maya.”
Not sure on the specifics of the contract. She’s been at the University of Oregon lately, starting in 2019, except they haven’t had a season this year because of the pandemic which is why she’s skipping over to Germany with SV Meppen in the meantime. The club didn’t confirm how long she’ll be at SVM for though it sounds like potentially she’ll head back to the States in January for her third year of uni.
SV Meppen drew their first two games but have lost four in a row since, the most recent coming just yesterday as they were dropped 2-1 by Werder Bremen... who just so happened to feature Jana Radosavljević coming on as a half-time sub. The only current New Zealander in the Bundesliga and also a dual-national who played for Serbia at U19 level before committing to Aotearoa and is now a fully capped Football Fern. You gain some, you lose some.
Which brings us to Tyler Boyd. Like Maya Hahn he’s an Ole Academy alum who played a bit for Aotearoa but then eventually chose to pursue international football elsewhere. The US of A in his case. It’s the same situation where he was equally eligible so it was a pure choice and considering what America has to offer it probably wasn’t that hard of a choice either. Boyd was a Wellington Phoenix lad back in the day but never quite fit in there and left to Portugal where he spent a few years at Vitoria SC, playing first in the reserves and then on loan at Tondela and then back at VSC before leaving on loan again, this time to Turkey. Ankaragücü were the lucky buggers who got him and he excelled there, earning a transfer to big boys Beşiktaş.
Boyd’s best work has come during his two loans... however you’d have been forgiven for thinking he was doing pretty well at Beşiktaş. He scored a beauty of a goal about a month back and had started each of the first six games of the new season (one of only three dudes to do so)... when suddenly he was chopped from the squad entirely. Not released, but deregistered. The Turkish league only allows 14 foreign roster spots in a team’s squad and Beşiktaş had four too many - hence four fellas had to miss the squad list and Boyd was one of them along with Jeremain Lens (Dutch international forward, ex-Sunderland), Nicolas Isimat-Mirin (French CB who played for PSV and spent last season loaned out at Toulouse), and Douglas (Brazilian right back who never cracked it at Barcelona).
There’s a side note there about Beşiktaş running their club with minimal logic given that all four of those guys were signed in the two years and all four of them have at least two years to run on their contracts (Boyd is on the books until 2023). To be icing out recent signings, to be overloaded with more foreigners than you’re allowed... that’s not exactly clever club management. And it’s especially odd when Boyd had been playing heaps. His international manager Danny H-- excuse me... his international manager Greg Berhalter has come out swinging in his defence...
Greggy B: “I'm not too happy with it. I've spoken to him and how the communication has gone is not great for a player to find that out that late, when the transfer window in Europe is closed. It comes out of the blue. It's surprising. Normally you'd expect the player, if that happened to him, he wouldn't be playing at all and the writing is on the wall. But this was unexpected.”
Yeah so pretty rude. Boyd cannot even be re-registered until January when the next transfer window opens which means that unless he can negotiate a loan move elsewhere – and it probably won’t be in Europe given the transfer windows are mostly all closed – then the only games he’ll play for the rest of the year will be for the USA national team when they take on Wales and Australia in November. But not the All Whites. Pity about that. Oh but we’re not done because then this rumour emerged out of Turkey...
No idea where that stemmed from but safe to say it’s a minimal chance of happening. He didn’t leave the best reputation at the club when he left back in the day and even though hardly anyone’s left from then and he’s older and more mature now that stuff still lingers. Plus are the Phoenix really in position to be targetting a marquee player when they couldn’t even afford to keep their club captain? Also not sure the timing really works out either since the next A-League season isn’t gonna start until after Christmas.
But more than that it’s a dead rumour because Tyler Boyd is an American international attacker who only needs to put the word out before his DMs will be flooded with MLS clubs asking if he wants to meet up IRL (and maybe send some pictures of his feet). When he signed with Beşiktaş there’d been chat he was being targetted by David Beckham’s Inter Miami team. The MLS season only has a month plus playoffs remaining so it could be a short term thing, at least to start with, but the transfer window is open until the end of the month (29 Oct, specifically) and if Tyler Boyd doesn’t sign with an MLS team before then... well, I’ll be a stunned mullet.
Ah yes and of course there’s also the news that the All Whites’ friendly against England at Wembley next month will not be going ahead. To be honest, it would have been silly to be completely confident of this one from the moment that the game against Belgium was called off for similar reasons. Amassing a competitive squad is very tricky when all your players are based in a conglomeration of different countries and even with a mostly/entirely European based squad as was gonna be picked there were still immense troubles with individual nations and quarantines and what that would mean for players’ availability or the sacrifices they’d have to make at club level, etc. England were gonna be a little more forthcoming than Belgium but still it was no small task.
Then when this little nugget emerged, which I noticed while reading up on that Tyler Boyd situation, I started to genuinely worry. The initial plan was that after the Belgium and England games we’d sneak in another friendly in each window, probably against Mexico and then USA. But here was one of America’s fullbacks talking up how they’re gonna be playing Australia – in England no less – in the exact window we were hoping to play them in...
Soon afterwards our England game was abandoned and the All Whites thus will not partake in footing any balls in the Year of our Lord 2020. At least the Football Ferns, frustrating as their mirroring situation also is, didn’t have to get their hopes up. Winston Reid and Tommy Smith are two of the dudes who’ve spoken with great excitement about the chance to play for their country at Wembley Stadium and that ain’t happening now (Reid’s likely MLS playoffs campaign means he probs wouldn’t have anyway, tbf). For understandable reasons, sure... but I don’t know it’s a good look to have announced games which you ultimately couldn’t commit to. Lends a bit of a shambolic aura to NZ Football at a time when they really don’t need that. Perfectly reasonable excuses to abandon those games but NZF’s (and Danny Hay’s) ambition has backfired badly here.
By the way who is stepping up to the platform to replace New Zealand in that England friendly? If reports are to be believed then that would be Australia, friends. The bastards stole pavlova. They stole Phar Lap. They stole Split Enz. Now they’ve stolen our November 2020 men’s international football window.
The Football Ferns have an Olympic campaign next year (if that goes ahead) and they haven’t played a game since March despite desperately needing the reps. The All Whites begin their World Cup qualifying journey in March next year and that’ll be the first time they’ve played since November 2019 which is really not what Danny Hay woulda had in mind when he took over.
There’s an alternate world in which the All Whites would have played Oman and Bahrain back in March, Belgium and Mexico last week, and England and USA next month. Instead... zero, nada, zilch. This whilst European teams are able to burn through complete international windows and just rub it in our face like that. This is a genuine worry. The reasons for all these cancelled All Whites games, again, are fair enough. It’s not reasonable for them to be playing and putting players at risk both from health perspectives (as nations like England, Spain & France all cope with frightening ‘second waves’ of covid-19) and also potentially from a career perspective (overblown in the NZF account of matters but still a factor). It’s just that it’s already hard enough for New Zealand football teams to compete when we’re eating at the geographic and financial kid’s table... now we’re basically excluded from dinner entirely thanks to situations beyond our control.
No use getting upset about things beyond our control though. It’s not like the All Whites are losing any ground, they’ve only played six games in the last three years so this is just the status quo for them. They’re not gaining any ground either at a time when the players available harken towards a little bit of a golden generation but we’ve just gotta trust that those dudes (and same for the ladies in the Ferns) will continue to grow and develop as players in those top level club environments and that the international stuff will fall into place when it needs to. No other choice, really.
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