Tagged with: All Whites
The important thing is that the All Whites got what they needed out of the match against Papua New Guinea with a 1-0 victory and if they end up returning to Qatar in November for the World Cup then nobody, absolutely nobody, not a soul in existence, is going to care about what happened in their first game of qualifying
Okay so first of all we’ve gotta set the scene here because this is not a normal All Whites squad. Ordinarily we could look at who’s in and who’s out and draw some conclusions about where everyone is in the depth chart but it feels reckless to do that in such crazy circumstances
Fair play to Jordan, they’re the strongest team that the AW’s have played since being beaten by the Republic of Ireland in Danny Hay’s first game in charge... but it’ll be a stronger team than Jordan that the All Whites come up against if they make the intercontinental playoff later in the year.
These All Whites are no longer a hypothetical team, so that’s nice. They’re cranking out the fixtures and seeking to build on what they’ve already achieved together under Danny Hay. Three wins on the bounce.
Three games post-hiatus for the All Whites, and three wins against three different nations from three different confederations. First they beat Curaçao 2-1, then they beat Bahrain 1-0, now they’ve beaten The Gambia 2-0.
All the talk about this latest All Whites squad has been about which bloke is unvaccinated and that’s largely because there’s not a whole lot else going on here. The Aotearoa men’s national team will face The Gambia on Wednesday 17 November NZT.
The last time the All Whites played against Bahrain, the kiwi team won 1-0 via a header off a wing-back’s cross by the son of a well known NZ sporting personality. Almost exactly a dozen years later the same damn thing happened again.
What is there to be gained from a couple of sneaky friendlies at this time? For starters there’s the obvious one of ending a 692 day hiatus between fixtures for the men’s national team of Aotearoa, that’s a pretty significant one
Once upon a time there was no way that you could have ever picked a New Zealand football team, male or female, worthy of the international stage built entirely from players based outside Australia and Aotearoa. But these days aren’t the old days.
Liberato Cacace made his senior international debut in June 2018 and still only has three caps. Compare that to Winston Reid’s buddy at West Ham, Declan Rice, who made his debut for England in March 2019 and has 26 caps with a couple goals to his name already.
It was the 2019 U20 World Cup that tipped the scales for Bayern Munich in their long term monitoring of Sarpreet Singh, having been aware of him since he was an 11 year old touring Germany with an age grade team.
It was overwhelming. A quarter-final against hosts Japan who had won all three of their group stage games with the prospect of advancing to the semis of a major-ish men’s football tournament but to do so would mean a pretty significant upset.
That chaotic defeat against Honduras seemed to rattle a fair few people but it didn’t shake the blokes who mattered. Or if it did, it did so in a good way.
The funkiest thing about that 1-0 win over South Korea is that the OlyWhites didn’t even play that well. How many times did you see someone spray a pass out to Libby Cacace’s wing and it end up flying out for a throw-in?
We are, currently, one week away from the beginning of the Tokyo 2020 (2021 Redux) Olympic Games and all that event entails. The two kiwi football squads are basically ready to go, most of them having been training together in Japan since early in the month.
The time has come, the squads have been revealed. The 36 footballers (plus eight travelling reserves) who will represent Aotearoa at the 2021 Tokyo 2020 Olympics have been made public.
Rightio so we’ve covered the ladies, now it’s the turn of the blokes in what was a much more confusing Olympic football draw and somehow also a much more beneficial one too. Like, we came out good from this one.
So a bittersweet week of remembrance then. Thinking wistfully of the past whilst also mourning the present, all of which giving you absolutely no idea of what the future is supposed to be.
The theme of this article is the ones that got away for New Zealand Football. No shortage of those out there 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.
What we have here is a unique set of dudes from which 20 out of 21 have played professionally as some stage and 14 of them are full internationals. Hence their respective journeys over the past five years offer a fascinating look at the life of the career footy player from Aotearoa.