The Football Ferns went to Chile and they lost both games. The first was a disappointing tactical approach in front of a pretty decent local crowd. The second had no crowd at all, in fact it was played behind closed doors, and a rotated team lost to a last minute goal. The Ferns scored once across 180 minutes against a lower-ranked team which failed to qualify for the recent World Cup. Not exactly how we were hoping to kick on after co-hosted the biggest women’s football tournament ever.

We’ll choose to overlook the fact that instead of a home series to gather up some of that post-World Cup glow, NZ Football instead scheduled a trip to South America for a squad based mostly in Europe and Australia with the first game being played on artificial turf and the second game not even available to the public (at Chile’s request, but still).

Behind closed doors games and artificial turf games: two things that should not be allowed for fully capped international matches. Like, Betsy Hassett celebrated her 150th cap in that BCD match and none of her family or friends could even see it, let alone be there. It’s vaguely understandable why they did it for the Italy game days before the World Cup given that they had a couple tactical tweaks on display there which they didn’t want the Norwegians to know about. But not for a tour like this. The Ferns also played a closed door friendly against Mexico in 2022. Ridiculous stuff.

But that’s a digression. This tour, unfortunately, seemed to offer more frustrating examples of the same old issues for the Fernies. They don’t score goals and they lose too many games. It’s like running up against a brick wall. Although if you’ve been reading these yarns regularly then you already know what the number one recurring theme of pretty much all of this team’s disappointing results is: missing/injured players.

There was no Ria Percival in the squad that travelled to Chile. She sat out in light of her long-term recovery from a very serious knee injury. She’s already been wrapped in cotton wool through Tottenham’s preseason so a flight around the world wasn’t the best idea and that’s fine. Good reasoning for a valid decision. But then the line-up was revealed for the first game and also sitting out with injury issues were: Olivia Chance, Claudia Bunge, and Jacqui Hand. None of them played the second game either. There go 3-4 probable starters and suddenly the team is a whole lot weaker.

This seems to happen a lot with the Football Ferns. In hindsight, Chance shouldn’t have even been picked at all given how she’s been managing that knee injury and doesn’t currently have a club. They did pick 24 players so perhaps that was taken into account. But Hand and Bunge had been playing club footy right up until the window. Did they aggravate something on tour or was the national team just overly cautious with existing niggles? Obviously none of us are privy to that answer but we do know that there always seems to be a couple such cases whenever this team plays and we also know that the Football Ferns only have a limited amount of established world class players so when two or three of them are missing it makes a significant difference to the team’s success.

Let us assume that the line-up of: Esson; Bott, Stott, Bowen, A.Riley; Steinmetz, Percival, Hassett; Hand, Wilkinson, I.Riley is the preferred starting eleven (since that’s what we saw vs Norway at the World Cup). Maybe make a concession for either Longo or Chance in the starters too since they weren’t 100% fit for that game. That’s 13 players. In fact let’s be even more generous and add Claudia Bunge in there too. 14 players who form the elite core of this team.

Jitka Klimková has now had 30 games in charge. Of those 30 games there are only three instances of her being able to pick an XI entirely from those 14 players: the win against Vietnam and the three World Cup games. Two wins, a draw, and a defeat conceding once in 360 minutes. There have been 10 instances (a full third of her games) where they’ve had 6 or fewer amongst the starters and that’s led to one draw and nine defeats with many of those defeats being by hefty margins. Every time key players are absent, expectations need to be adjusted... and this team always seems to be missing key players.

However that doesn’t excuse the first game against Chile where they had nine starters from that 14-player group and still lost 3-0. That one probably has to fall upon the manager’s shoulders. Klimková does get a fair bit of criticism about her record as head coach but player availability and the quality of opponents has always been a much bigger factor in those struggles. Having said that, there have recently been a few more instances of poor outcomes against teams that aren’t automatic favourites against Aotearoa. Teams like Chile and the Philippines and Argentina. Something to keep an eye upon there, just to make sure it doesn’t blossom into a full-blown trend.

But whereas Klimková can be excused for many of those losses, and deserves heaps of credit for a superb game-plan in the Norway win, she’s going to have to cop the bulk of the blame for what happened in game one versus Chile. JK had said prior to the game that they had two plans for combating Chile – one based on their scouting of Chile in the past and one based on their expectations of Chile under a new coach. Safe to say they picked the wrong one.

Because what happened in that game was that Chile let NZ have a lot of the ball and then pressed them high and hard. The Ferns wanted to play out from the back but a midfield trio with Malia Steinmetz holding and a more advanced duo of Betsy Hassett and Indi Riley ahead simply did not provide the necessary outlets. Centre-backs Katie Bowen and Rebekah Stott were coughing up way too much ball and they were not alone. Those two are normally really good distributors but you can’t complete a pass if there’s nobody to pass to, right?

So Chile would steal the ball in midfield and then hit the Ferns in transition. Over and over again. Vic Esson was surprisingly below her usual standards in goal (basically the first time she’s been less than great in her international career) and that meant big trouble ensued. Two of Chile’s goals were from following up the rebounds off the frame of the goal. Another was a weird instance of Stott misjudging a long pass and Bowen not closing out. They seemed shaken. They could hardly get the ball out of their own half. It was a mess.

To make matters worse, Chile played very compactly by crowding the central areas whereas the Ferns tried to stretch their shape across the full width of the field. But that only worked to further isolate the kiwi forwards from each other. Plus it’s not like we have the players to go 1v1 in those situations anyway.

It’s encouraging that the Ferns want to play a more possession-based game... but that cannot come at the expense of the team’s strengths – which are its physicality and defensive mahi (which was at the core of the Norway win). Chile aren’t the only team to have success by sitting deep against the Ferns lately either… it’s the same strategy that got the treats for the Philippines. This is just a theory but I suspect if the tactics had been the other way around, with NZ staying compact and letting Chile have the ball and then hitting them on the break, then the result would have been the other way around too. That’s how Chile lost in the WC qualifiers: they got bus-parked by Haiti. This is also where Percival’s absence was most felt.

The selection of Indi Riley in midfield did actually produce some nice instances when she was able to get the ball at her feet in the Chile half... however it didn’t matter because the front three of Gabi Rennie, Hannah Wilkinson, and Paige Satchell was never going to get it done. The work-rate from those three is immense. They’re all strong and determined. But they’re also all below-average finishers who were going up against Christiane Endler. Chuck some terrible crossing accuracy onto the bonfire and it only gets worse. Wilkinson was barely even part of this game until she got sent off (in yet another instance of the Ferns doing self-inflicted damage that day).

(By the way, dunno if you noticed Vic Esson faking an injury straight after the red card so that the team could huddle up and reset their tactics... don’t say I didn’t warn ya)

Somehow Rennie is up to 30 caps and Satchell has 46 (46 is more than CJ Bott and as many as Liv Chance). Many of those have been off the bench but it highlights where the Ferns are at in the attacking positions. A raft of retirements after the 2019 World Cup left them having to pick project players who haven’t had time to earn those spots. Those project players have now become regulars and the team can’t score goals. Funny, that.

Rennie remains a great prospect at only 22 years of age... but for now she’s still at college in the USA and she hasn’t ever been a regular starter even at that level. She didn’t score a single goal during her 2022 season (although has begun 2023 much stronger). She had two good chances in game one. There was a shot that she blasted over the top at 0-0 and another turned on target but saved on 0-2. According to the NZF report she also missed from six yards at 1-1 in game two (and got injured in the process, leading to the Ferns finishing with ten women again, leading to Chile scoring a winner in the fourth minute of stoppage time). In a few years she might be burying one or two of those opportunities but these days she’s being put in a situation that she’s not ready for. Rennie has started 11 games for the Ferns and they’ve not won any of them.

Rennie will finish college in a few months and hopefully pick up a professional deal. That’s when her development will really ramp up. Based on recent examples that probably means a gig in the A-League... where players like Grace Jale, Deven Jackson, Hannah Blake, Milly Clegg, Ruby Nathan, plus a raft of Wellington Phoenix options already are. Hopefully Maggie Jenkins will make a similar move when she finishes college after the current season.

As for Satchell, she just got released by a Phoenix team trying to solve their goal-scoring issues yet remains a regular for the Football Ferns who have the same issue but at a tougher level. Satch just moved to London City Lionesses in the English second tier which is a brilliant move and she should benefit heaps from that. This is no shade on either of them as players. It’s shade on the way that NZ Football has been caught in such a massive chasm beyond the Hearn/Gregorius/White days because the second tier of attacking players never got properly nurtured and they had to start again almost from scratch.

New days are coming. A quick peek at some of the recent NZ youth teams show a sudden emergence of technical midfielders and creative forwards the likes of which we never used to have. Here’s an article with a few examples to follow closely. Most of our European/USA pros are still defenders and goalkeepers but that won’t be the case for too much longer and the next waves coming through will take that even further.

When you only have a certain amount of professionals then you have to pick the same women even if they’re out of form or not yet ready. Competition for places is what will take this team forward. The All Whites have it. The All Whites are riding the same wave but are a couple of years ahead of the Ferns. Darren Bazeley just picked a squad that doesn’t include a single A-League player and it doesn’t look any less competitive. The Ferns need more time to get to that point but they’re on course.

To be clear, we’re only talking about the creative side of the team. Forget the first Chile game, the Ferns are in a good place defensively. There’s already good depth in those positions – as we saw when Meikayla Moore was dropped for the World Cup after two tough years at club level (FYI, Moore just got nominated for SWPL player of the month so the comeback is on). We’re doing alright if Claudia Bunge is only on the bench.

The midfield still slaps too, albeit a few of them are on the older side. Ria Percival, Betsy Hassett, Annalie Longo... all 32 or 33 years of age. No imminent retirements there but it’s like the striker thing a few years back: we can’t let them all leave at once without having their replacements ready to go. Thankfully Malia Steinmetz has emerged, while Grace Wisnewski did get some minutes in game two vs Chile. Daisy Cleverley’s hanging out as well.

The foundations of a strong team are already there. It’s mainly just the struggles in attack that are holding them back: they don’t create enough and they don’t convert enough. The World Cup helped sort out a few things, with Jacqui Hand and Indi Riley (two of the rare European pro attackers available) rising above the crowd. They’re going to be there in four years time. Now the task for Coach JK is to begin working out who’ll join them. That’s the main task. Forget about the 2024 Olympics because that’s a 12-team competition and we’ll be the worst team there. It’s the four year run-in towards 2027 that needs to be embraced.

That process has already begun because if one player managed to come out of that Chile tour with reputation enhanced it was Milly Clegg. Still only 17 years old but she played the second half of game one and started game two and looks as though she’s gotten stronger during her ALW offseason. Physicality was an (expected) issue for her last A-League season but she’s already getting comfortable with it. Finishing will never be a worry for Clegg. Her movement is getting better and better. There were signs of some useful pressing against Chile. Pretty sure we’re going to be seeing lots more of Clegg for the Ferns from now on – with the Oceania Olympic Qualifiers early next year a nice chance to bolster her stats with a few goals.

It wasn’t only Clegg either. Game two wasn’t available to watch but certain details are out there and there were starts also for Anna Leat, Kate Taylor, and Grace Jale while Grace Wisnewski came off the bench. Both Grace Neville and Ally Green added to their cap count.

It’s one thing to demand that Klimková stops picking all the same players all the time, it’s another thing to throw up alternatives who are commanding a strong enough case for it. Because, let’s be fair, when those players have emerged, JK has picked them. Michaela Foster is now Ali Riley’s left back deputy. Milly Clegg made the World Cup squad at 17 years of age. Mack Barry, Taylor, and Wisnewski have been capped as Nix standouts, while Bri Edwards and Alyssa Whinham have made squads. JK gave Jacqui Hand and Indi Riley their debuts. Heck, she’s even given debuts to Tayla O’Brien and Deven Jackson who were the two best attacking players in the National League last year.

In the end, this article has turned inot another angle upon a familiar theme: development happens at a club level. How can the Football Ferns take that next step? By getting more players in professional environments. That process doesn’t end in the A-League but it does begin there and we’re on course for another record haul of ALW players in the upcoming season – many of them being attack-minded players from outside this current squad. Even the first-choicers need that nudge of a challenger breathing down their neck from time to time. We’re getting there. But in the meantime it may be best to give that Chilean tour the old out-of-sight-out-of-mind treatment.

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