Here’s The One About Kiwi Players In The NZ Premiership
There’s a little bit of confusion around the NZ Premiership tagline: ‘Where All Whites Are Made’. This is an amateur league after all, one which the best players from Aotearoa are seeking to escape. Maybe it’s a launch-pad for them, maybe that’s what they mean. ‘Where All Whites are Made’ in the same way that farms are where sausages are made; sort of but not really.
Because while we all want to see the top league in the country get better and better, we’d also rather see fewer and fewer players getting picked for the national team out of it. We’re almost there already, the All Whites have never picked a fully professional squad before but they could have/should have. It’s just a couple Moses Dyer, Clayton Lewis, Rory Fallon selections in the last few teams that have prevented it. And Lewis has since gone pro while Fallon has since retired. Moses Dyer did the trial rounds in Europe a few months ago as well, he might not be that far away either.
Therein lies the conundrum. Does the Premiership have a responsibility to develop kiwi players for future pro careers overseas or is it just a happy coincidence when something like that happens? Where’s the balance between promoting local players and keeping a respectably competitive league? Why the hell aren’t they allowed to put up full online highlights (or even full streams/replays) when NZF are apparently paying Sky Sports to broadcast this stuff? (Okay, getting off topic there… though it’d help with the homemade youtube scouting vids for players looking to impress).
The main thing to remember is that no team has the dineros to fill out a hypothetical squad full of foreign players anyway so there’s always gonna be a local flavour to things. And NZF have tweaked it a tiny bit this season by reducing the allowance of eight foreign players in a matchday squad to seven and a bonus Oceania player. There’s a sidenote in there about the Prem’s responsibility as the top domestic league in OFC as well, if we’re gonna see teams stacked with overseas players then a few may as well be from within the confederation. That’s just cool to see, and nobody’s ever regretted signing Roy Krishna. Heck, even Tommy Semmy, he’s been one of the rare shining lights for Hamilton Wanderers this season.
On these kiwi players though, it’s still possible under these rules to pick a starting XI with only three NZers. Taking the obvious example, Auckland City’s last game saw them start five kiwis, three Spaniards, one Mexican, one Englishman and a Solomon Islander… which was Micah Lea’alafa and he wasn’t even on the team-list so they ended up forfeiting that match against Tasman Utd. File that under: Silly Things That Have Happened in the NZ Prem.
But those kiwis include golden boot candidate Ryan De Vries (who's lost his tied lead thanks to the two goals that got wiped off in the Tassie game). They include full internationals Te Atawhai Hudson-Wihongi and Cam Howieson. They include 18 year old breakthrough talent Callum McCowatt who was one of a trio of Ole Academy grads that they fill their roster out with at the start of the season (and also Dan Morgan, shout out to him).
McCowatt is the best example in the league right now of the benefits of investing in young kiwi players, giving them game time and watching them thrive. Nobody’s kidding themselves and saying the NZ Premiership is on par with the English Premier League or anything. The best teenaged players are capable of playing at this level and, to be honest, it’s super exciting to see them when they do. It adds a spark to the competition. Another thing to get people interested.
McCowatt is also one of a number of guys from last year’s U20 World Cup squad getting minutes in the Prem. Plenty of them are off in American colleges or club academies overseas but Moses Dyer and Reece Cox are regulars for Eastern Suburbs. James McGarry’s been playing well for the Wee Nix alongside Logan Rogerson and Sarpreet Singh. Jack-Henry Sinclair is at Team Wellington. Sean Liddicoat is playing for Canterbury. That’s the thing, there actually are quite a few young New Zealanders getting opportunities and a few of these guys will surely follow the path of Clayton Lewis and others by leaping from this league into professional ones elsewhere, at the Phoenix or overseas. There’s still a question over whether players from outside these sanctified youth international squads have the same pathway but that’s way too complicated an issue to get into now.
Then there are those lads that went overseas and, for whatever reason, found themselves back here. Perhaps they graduated college, perhaps they got a taste of the pros. Francis De Vries recently popped back over to play for Canterbury after getting released by the Vancouver Whitecaps. Brock Messenger is at Eastern Suburbs after a stint in Scandinavia, Chris James had a long career in Europe and a bit of the USA before coming back as well. Cam Howieson falls in this category. Liam Graham and Kris Bright as well. Tim Payne. Birhanu Taye. Eric Panzer. Louis Fenton if you wanna count him.
When NZF restricted the foreign player quota, they were doing so largely in response to the OFC sharpening their own quota to a piercing Three-Plus-One (three imports and an Oceanian). Which means that Auckland City and Team Wellington could make it to the OFC Champions League with major influence from foreign players but they can only use half of them in trying to qualify for the Club World Cup. Funnily enough that’s seen ACFC trend a little more towards the kiwis, while Team Welly already had a nice number of Phoenix offloads and Wellingtonian scrappers, so the best teams in the league are the ones most incentivised to build around NZers… stark contrast to how the best leagues in the world run where the top teams in England, Italy, Germany, France and Spain can (but usually don’t, to be fair) name teams almost devoid of homegrown nationals.
The Premiership has to have foreign players though. Guys like Emiliano Tade raise the standard of the league immensely, thus bringing the locals up with him. And if we’re talking about raising up All Whites then we’re only talking about the very best talent anyway, rather than filling out squads with random battlers from club footy. Arguably that’s the real issue here: kiwi depth.
Canterbury United have made a concerted effort to target players from their area, as have Team Wellington. Both pretty successfully too. But so have the likes of Southern United, Hawke’s Bay United and Hamilton Wanderers to much less impressive results. Southern just don’t have the homegrown players to compete and it’s their Irish contingent that’s doing the damage for them, from manager Paul O’Reilly on down. Hawke’s Bay could barely field a full squad a few weeks before the season and have had to fill things out with some handy globetrotters. As for Wanderers, well… Ricki Herbert knew a couple Papua New Guineans but otherwise it’s a lot of Waikato blokes and they haven’t won a damn game all season. Didn’t win one in all of 2017 in fact.
NZ Footy are probably gonna bring the foreign quota down even more in the future, which shouldn’t make much of a difference given there’s a decent level of young kiwi players coming up to meet it. Although… the more local players are emphasised, the more the fear will be that ACFC and Welly are gonna snap them all up, widening the gulf between them and everyone else.
The one team that’s really both talking the talk and walking the walk here is Eastern Suburbs. Danny Hay’s spoken heaps about wanting to develop NZers and live up to the league’s tagline and the club’s highlighted that dedication from the start. Danny Hay’s so committed to it that he walked away from the NZ U17s gig to focus on actually coaching the up and comers. He no longer wanted to coach a youth team in order to focus on a senior team in order to focus on youth development.
True to form, there’s just one non-kiwi in that squad (Englishman Derek Tieku). It’s a young team stacked with players under 25 years old. Stacked with youth internationals and the likes. Moses Dyer, Tim Payne, Reese Cox, Andre de Jong, Brock Messenger, etc. And, yeah, boy do they make a noise about it. Considering they’re well in the hunt for a semi-final place at the half-way stage, the strategy might even catch on.
Of course, the Wellington Phoenix Reserves are loaded up with kiwis too but they’re a slightly different proposition. They really are a development team, the kind that some people probably wish every team in the Prem was. But this has to be a competitive competition too. Otherwise it’s not a competition, right?
So it’s probably best to think on this whole thing as a process. It’d be nice to see more kiwis not only playing but also dominating in the Premiership but there have to be players of the necessary ability for that to happen, so in the meantime the imports have gotta hold it down. The players are coming, and the imports will be slimmed, but it’s gotta happen carefully so as to keep the integrity of the competition alive (no jokes about the competition’s integrity, please). All Whites are being made here… but mostly only at a couple of clubs. Also they’ll probably have to leave to get picked.
Does that clear anything up for ya?
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