Was pretty pleased with the Japan fixture. Good time for NZ to pressure Japan about the promise to reschedule the 2011 match given that it must be difficult for us at the moment to get meaningful opposition, and I wonder whether the Japanese fans and team would actually quite like to have a more straight-forward fixture (relatively speaking) after what has been a very heavy schedule of high quality matches this year.
Just looked up their schedule and holy shit they have played alot this year. 19 matches according to wikipedia, including a number of very high quality European teams, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, Ghana and all of the top Asian teams.
Makes you realise once again how poor NZ's football fixture list has been, but that conversation has been done to death already.