Here’s How Indiah-Paige Riley Fits Into A Football Ferns Team In Need Of Creativity
There’s no easy fix when an international team is struggling for results. You can sack the manager but that often isn’t the solution it initially appears to be. And unlike club teams they’re not together on the training paddock throughout the weeks, able to knuckle down on tactical and technical ideas. In fact club teams have an even better option than that at their disposal because they can always simply sign more players. Don’t have a top notch goalkeeper or whatever? Just go out and buy one!
International teams have to work with what they’ve got and they have to do so in limited international windows. That’s difficult. That’s tough. Particularly if you’re a team like the Football Ferns who know they have troubles scoring goals but solutions continue to prove elusive. Although it appears they have found one handy course of action: can’t go out and buy players... but we can always steal them from Australia.
Jokes, there’s no stealing involved. International allegiances are always an individual decision and often times there’s more than one country that a person might feel equally passionate about representing. Still, it’s a pleasant coincidence that in the last few months the Football Ferns have managed to prise first Ally Green and now Indiah-Paige Riley away from the Matildas system. Green was born and raised in Sydney but with a kiwi mother. Riley was born in Auckland and lived there until the age of 12 when she moved to Queensland. Both entirely eligible for either nation. Both have played a decent chunk of Aussie youth stuff. Both have chosen to switch to Aotearoa.
The 2023 World Cup was a big factor, no doubt. Playing in a home World Cup is literally a once in a lifetime opportunity, and given that neither Green nor Riley had been making Tillies squads it was unlikely that they were gonna force their way in between now and then. The Ferns, on the other hand, don’t have quite the same waiting list.
Indi Riley has actually played for the senior Matildas. She earned her one and only cap for Australia in a friendly against Germany back in April 2021. Got fifteen minutes off the bench, replacing Caitlin Foord in what ended as a 5-2 defeat. However the only time she’s been called up since was as an injury replacement. Ally Green never got that far, only playing up to the U20 level.
Word was that Indi Riley would have been a part of the last NZ U20 World Cup squad had that tournament not been canned for pando reasons. So this is something that was already on the cards presumably before she made her Matildas debut, though you get the feeling Green wouldn’t have gone down the New Zealand pathway had she not gotten the impression that she wasn’t in the Matildas picture. Oh yeah and these are permanent switches too. FIFA’s current regulations allow you to switch nations once and once only, and even then you can’t have played for your previous team at a major senior tournament or after the age of 21. It’s a bit more complicated than that but who cares. Point is: they can’t go back. Sorry, ‘Tildas.
Ally Green and Indi Riley aren’t only good players, they’re good young players with professional deals in Europe who are only going to get better and better being exposed to that level. Green signed with Vålerenga in Norway after the last A-League season (having come up winning a heap of games with Sydney FC). VIF is the same club that CJ Bott played Champions League for a couple years back. Bott also won a league title and a pair of cup finals with them. Visa issues held her up by Green did finally make a club debut a few weeks before the league went on hiatus for Euro 2022.
Meanwhile Indi Riley’s situation is even more exciting. She plays for Fortuna Hjørring in Denmark who are one of the top clubs in that country (and likely to be in a title race with Daisy Cleverley’s HB Køge next season). In two seasons she’s scored 7 goals with 6 assists in 39 league appearances plus she’s also made four Champions League appearances, three of them starts. In the same season as CJ Bott played for Vålerenga in the round of 32, Indi Riley’s Fortuna Hjørring went one round deeper. Now they did lose 9-0 on aggregate to Barcelona in that round of 16... but Barcelona went on to win that UCL title blitzing Chelsea 4-0 in the final so can’t take it too hard. Riley is still only 20 years old and she’s already played against Barcelona in the Champions League.
Ally Green made her Ferns debut off the bench against Wales in the most recent match. As a specialist left-back, she’s not going to edge out captain Ali Riley any time soon but she does slide in as her natural successor. Great left foot, a strong crosser who also has the ability to shoot from range. Strong technically. There’s always room for players like that in any squad. Shout out to Ally Green... though Indi Riley is the one who really moves the needle.
That’s because Riley (Riley of the Indiah-Paige variety – weird how both of them share names with existing Ferns veterans) is a right winger, someone who can both score goals and create them, and therefore a player who fits a really specific - and borderline desperate - need for Aotearoa. The Football Ferns have won just one of their last 23 fixtures. The majority of those were against stronger teams expected to beat them, okay, but they’d have a better shot at a few more upsets if they could have scored more than 11 goals in those matches. Only once did they score multiple goals in a game during that stretch and guess what? It was the game they won. 2-0 vs South Korea back in November.
There are lots of reasons why this team doesn’t score goals and it’d be unfair to ignore the fact that they’re making good progress under Jitka Klimková. They’re becoming a team more confident in possession and JK has spoken of specific attacking patterns that they’re trying to develop (such as crosses from the by-line). That’s all good stuff. It also helps to have better players though.
You only have to look at squads to see the underlying issue. More kiwi wahine than ever are playing professionally overseas but a large portion of them are, you know... defenders. Like, we’re stacked for quality CBs. No dramas there. Klimková picked four of them in the last game with Meikayla Moore and Liz Anton playing fullback while Claudia Bunge and Rebekah Stott played through the middle. And that was without Abby Erceg being available. In comparison the forward line is notably younger, less experienced, and less professional. Professional as in their club situations, not their attitudes... just to clarify.
Never was that more blatant than at the 2019 World Cup. That team had women employed in the top divisions of England, USA, Norway, France, Sweden, and Iceland... but none of them were strikers or wingers. The then-current clubs of the five main forwards were: Unattached (Hannah Wilkinson), Unattached (Rosie White), Unattached (Emma Kete), Three Kings United (Paige Satchell), and Miramar Rangers (Sarah Gregorius). This was at a World Cup. In fairness, Wilkinson was coming off an ACL injury and Kete and Gregorius had come out of retirement... though if anything that only highlights the problem further.
Since then there’s been a pretty deliberate attempt to skew younger in those positions. Outside of Hannah Wilkinson and Olivia Chance, there don’t seem to be any attackers in the prime of their careers whom the coaches reckon are at the required level. Hence they’re trying to use these international games to further the development of some of the best prospects out there. Gabi Rennie and Jacqui Hand in particular have become regular picks whilst still at university in America (Hand has since gone pro with Åland Utd in the Finland). Fellow student Ava Collins has also started games under JK. Probably chuck Grace Jale in there too, having featured a bit off the bench and after the U20 World Cup takes place in August there may well be a few from that lot who get a look in too.
Liv Chance, Hannah Wilkinson, and Paige Satchell have all started each of the last four matches – the most recent two featuring 4-4-2 shapes with Katie Bowen on the right wing opposite Chance. Rennie has come off the bench in 4/4 of those games. Jale in 3/4. Hand in 2/4 (would be 4/4 but she missed the Aussie tour with covid). Also Rolston 2/4 and Collins 1/4. They’re the ones getting the minutes in the forward line. Now here are their current/most recent club situations, along with age and caps...
Hannah Wilkinson – Melbourne City (Australia) | 30yo | 107 caps (27 goals)
Liv Chance – Celtic (Scotland) | 28yo | 32 caps (1 goal)
Paige Satchell – Sydney FC (Australia) | 24yo | 30 caps (2 goals)
Gabi Rennie – Indiana University (USA) | 21yo | 14 caps (2 goals)
Grace Jale – Wellington Phoenix (Australia) | 23yo | 7 caps (2 goals)
Jacqui Hand - Åland United (Finland) | 23yo | 8 caps (1 goal)
Emma Rolston – Avaldsnes (Norway) | 25yo | 12 caps (6 goals)
Ava Collins – St John’s University (USA) | 20yo | 5 caps (0 goals)
On the last tour, the three Aussie/NZ based players were all a couple months out of season. A couple of them only play at uni level where they exclusively come up against others their own age. Liv Chance is a regular for a good Celtic team but she plays central midfield for them and left wing for the national team. You can imagine how that isn’t entirely conducive to unfiltered attacking creativity.
Indi Riley is younger than everyone there except Ava Collins (and there’s only 4-5 months in it). She’s played more A-League games than anyone else on that list. She’s already played Champions League (only Chance has even featured in qualifiers). In fact you’d probably have to say she plays at a higher level than any of the current attackers. Wilkie has done top flight in Sweden in the past which might edge Denmark but that’s the past. And she didn’t play for title contending teams either.
Gotta pump the brakes a little now and remind you that Indi Riley is 20 years old and far from the finished product. There’s a reason Australia weren’t selecting her so it’s not like we’ve just stumbled into Ada Hegerberg or Beth Mead or Vivianne Miedema or whoever. But she’s an immediate help in a problem area, at worst offering much-needed depth and at best raising the bar which the others in that group have to aim for.
In a funky kinda way she adds to the trend of the Ferns skewing younger with their forwards whilst also being exactly the high-level pro they need more of. Expect her to debut at the first possible opportunity in the friendly against Japan in October. Can’t wait to see what she brings.
If you dig the chat on TNC, you can support the mahi via our Patreon page
Also helps to whack an ad, sign up to our most excellent Substack, and tell your mates all about us
Keep cool but care