What We Want to See From the All Whites Against Oman

All right. This has gone on long enough now, it’s time we spoke up. Something needs to be done.

Since Anthony Hudson took over as All Whites manager, the team has played five times, all against Asian opposition, and has lost three and drawn two, scoring three and conceding eight. He got the job in August 2014 which means that he’s now into his fifteenth month in charge and is yet to oversee a victory.

Now, to be fair to Hudson that streak goes back a lot further than his tenure. The All Whites last won in September 2013, a 1-0 result in (and against) Saudi Arabia – the lone goal scored by the legend that was Chris Killen. Since that game we’ve been treated to this:

That’s 11 games and 25 months without a win. Ricki Herbert’s time at the helm certainly came to a grinding halt with those Mexican games, though not unexpectedly (Mexico went on to make the knockouts of the 2014 World Cup before winning the 2015 CONCACAF Gold Cup). Neil Emblen then did nothing out of the ordinary as caretaker in getting a solid draw against South Africa, as well as that hiding to Japan (it ended 4-2 but we were 4-0 down after 17 minutes – granted Japan are also a great footballing team).

Disclaimer before this next thrusted knife: The FIFA Rankings are absolute rubbish that carry almost zero relevance beyond the top 50 or so positions. Having said that, they’re easy numbers and easy numbers make good stats which make great evidence. So here we go. In 2002 the New Zealand National Football Team accidentally reached their all-time high of 47th in the world. That was an anomaly. But after the 2010 World Cup we were able to crack the top 50 once more, settling in at a high of 49. Since then we’ve see-sawed largely depending on whether we played or not but in 2014 when Hudson took over, we averaged a position of 90th. We currently occupy the 159th spot, the lowest this team has ever been, wedged in between Malta and Tajikistan.

This quite obviously is not good enough for a team that actually thinks they have a chance of qualifying for the next World Cup. To do that we’ll have to go through the fifth place finisher in South America, which will probably be one of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay or Colombia. Yikes.

It’s tough to demand results in this situation because Hudson has never had a game in charge where he wasn’t missing several key players – and it’s not as though New Zealand has all that many top footballers to spare. But… that’s kind of the way it goes. That’s what you have to deal with and you have to find a way around it, be it tactically or by some other advantage. For example, we haven’t played a home game since the draw vs South Africa.

The reasons for that are probably to do with: A) Money. Getting crowds to friendly internationals tends not to work that well outside of rugby in NZ (9600 attended the SA match at Mt Smart). And B) Competition. It’d be harder to attract better teams if they have to travel here and it’d be harder to get the best kiwi players back here if they’re playing weaker opposition. But then you don’t really know if you don’t try (and maybe they have?).

Speaking personally for a second, the other team doesn’t have to be any good for me to go watch so long as they have at least one cool player that I know from the telly. I’d watch the hell outta NZ vs Kenya if Victor Wanyama played. Or Yannick Bolasie for the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hell, imagine Costa Rica playing here with Carlos Hernandez and Kenny Cunningham! (I shouldn’t even have to mention that an Australia vs New Zealand match would be golden – in prospect and result, probably).

Results aren’t the be all and end all, but they’re a big part of how a manager and a team are judged. You can delay that judgement with talk of developing depth and building for the future but when your national team has not won a game in over two years, that simply has to become a priority. This isn’t supposed to be an easy job; if you don’t get it done then you will be held accountable regardless of the circumstances. There’s no way we shouldn’t have beaten that Myanmar team. We could easily have gotten things off Thailand and South Korea.

From the start, Hudson talked about the style of football that he wanted to bring to this team. This from a FIFA.com interview in 2014:

“We are changing the style of play. We want to create an identity for the team for 2018 and beyond, and also we want to create an identity for New Zealand football. We are in the process now of building our new team culture, and how we operate on and off the field.” - AH

The problem is: we’re not seeing any of this. Maybe we don’t have the players to do what he wants them to do… or maybe it’s down to the fact that he’s tried three different formations in five games (4-2-3-1, 4-3-3 & 5-3-2). On the field there hasn’t been anything close to cohesion. The All Whites have struggled to create chances, as they traditionally do, and they’ve been conceding soft goals. It’s not easy to build combinations with people you play with a couple of times a year but that’s not helped by giving 13 debuts in five games – with a potential five more on the cards against Oman. This isn’t like the All Blacks integrating a couple new faces into an established team with a winning culture. This is throwing young players in at the deep end (arguably before they’ve earned it). There’s almost a dismissive sense of colonialism about it, picking weakened line-ups (both forced and unforced) against small nations built largely around local based players and still expecting triumphs. 

Of course Anthony Hudson is not doing any of this without the best intentions. He wants wins. He wants quality football. He wants depth of talent. The problem is that all of these different goals are intertwined. Playing inexperienced players at a higher level helps them to develop, but inexperienced players are less likely to get results. A new style of play requires experimentation, but we don’t have time to experiment because we demand results. The All Whites don’t win games, but if we don’t build an extended squad we can draw from to overcome missing players then we’ll never have sustained success.

This shouldn’t be read strictly as a Hudson critique (even if ‘til now it’s been written as one, sorry). The players should be accountable. They’re not finishing chances, they’re not keeping possession and they’re not defending their goal. They have to play better and there’s only so much that a coach can do for them – once they’re out on the pitch it’s their responsibility. And Hudson has done a good job in aligning the various age level teams.

Plus - the elephant in every NZ Football conversation - Hudson was not responsible for the concoction of complete muppetry that was the Eligibility Saga. There are people in high roles whose jobs it was to ensure that such things don’t happen and they didn’t do that. My theory is that the only reason they appealed that trash at all was to stretch the drama out so far and so long that the public eventually got tired of it and they stopped demanding the falling of folks upon their own swords if only because they didn’t care anymore. They’d already cast out the sacrificial lamb of Fred De Jong (who as High Performance Director, should have been making his appointments at WINZ the day after this whole thing broke).

Unfortunately that drama spills out further than the Olympic team. It means the likes of Deklan Wynne and Storm Roux, who were fast emerging as our best fullbacks (Roux especially, he started all four games he was there for under Hudson) are no longer available. At least not until the paperwork gets done. They should be good for dispensation if we ask nicely but then maybe not after having flaunted FIFA’s rules in their face by ignoring them already.

And when you add ridiculous crap like that into a meat pie that already includes the difficulties of getting European-based guys to Oman or Myanmar to play (which they have absolutely no responsibility to do, therefore cannot be blamed – it’s just the way it is), then you can’t really complain about consistency of selection. But it’d be nice to know that the best players available were still getting picked, rather than the Oprah approach of the last year or so. “You get a cap, you get a cap… everybody gets a cap!”

Like, where’s Jeremy Brockie, who broke his (embarrassing) goal drought under Hudson’s tutelage, when his South African club teammate Michael Boxall is on the trip? We can understand why guys such as Winston Reid, Tommy Smith and Bill Tuiloma weren’t included (coming back from injury, pressing club duty and trying to earn a spot in a new team, respectively). But the reasons behind those selections were quite odd. Bill Tuiloma’s fitness was questioned (he’s yet to play 90 mins for NZ) and it was said he’d need to play more regular football. Fair enough concerns, but who’s giving you a better 60 mins in midfield? And then where’s Tyler Boyd, who has played 13 times for Vitoria SC’s reserve team this season yet was left out for “footballing reasons”. As for excluding Winston, there was nothing at all to question there:

“This is common sense. Winston would've played 90 minutes (for West Ham). Now for the following days after that he will be on the treatment table. Let's throw in there he's had numerous amounts of injections in his hip... To put him on an aeroplane straight after playing his first 90 minutes for four weeks is a huge risk, a huge gamble and potentially he doesn't even play in our game." - AH

Nothing at all… until the last bit. Jeezus, if you have Winston Reid in your squad then you’d better bloody play him, matey. If you don’t, then you’re clearly not giving yourself the best chance of a result and if that’s the case then you cannot get all defensive about it. We have a right to expect our national team to try and win games. It’s the only one we’ve got.

Looking specifically at Oman, we don’t know what to expect from them. Their best player is keeper Ali Al-Habsi who plays for Reading in the Championship and has played Premier League with Bolton and Wigan, though for the most part it’ll be another locally built squad. Oman are undefeated in their last seven games, including three wins and a couple draws in preliminary World Cup qualifiers. But then beating India and Turkmenistan probably isn’t all that illuminating. Hey, Hudson says he’s looking at World Cup qualification himself. It surely isn’t unreasonable to expect a World Cup finalist to beat a team that Australia pumped 4-0 in the Asian Cup in January. Or at least get a promising draw with a few some signs of progress.

Losing Shane Smeltz isn’t a massive blow. We still have Chris Wood as the focal point (who regathered a little goal scoring form this week) and he’ll be ably supported by the likes of Ryan Thomas, Marco Rojas and Kosta Barbarouses. Not to mention the incoming prospect of Henry Cameron, an 18 year old with 14 appearances for Blackpool in League One this season and who is eligible via a kiwi mother (Oh, thank God!).

Midfield is a tough one beyond Wee Mac (who’s better further forward), while the defence might be a worry with only Boxall, Brotherton, Doyle, Fenton and Tzimopoulos to choose from. Boxall has 13 caps and will walk into that side. The others have 6 combined and haven’t really done much to date, though Brotherton was one of the standouts of the U-20 World Cup campaign. It’s funny, because defence has never been the worry before, but the retirements of Durante, Sigmund and even Nelsen way back when (his last international was a 3-0 win over Tahiti in October 2012) have kinda decimated the stocks. We look almost completely skint with no Winston or Tommy. In goal, Stefan Marinovic is one who really has impressed in his two internationals so far. He’ll do fine so long as he gets a little protection.

We can’t expect this team to play fluid attacking football quite yet. We can’t expect to see our best players every game. We can’t expect to beat every team we play. But we should expect to see gradual improvements and we should expect to see the best players available and we should expect to see them win a game every now and then. It’s becoming a bit of a mantra but it’s not supposed to be easy and yet there are no excuses. Over to you now, Anthony. No pressure.​

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Written by Nick Robinson On Tagged ,