All Whites V New Caledonia 22 March 7:35pm - Craft Bar or Four Kings

 Bit late to all of this. Has there been any official comment on the ref's performance yet?

Should have asked Ricki actually but he was pretty busy on the phone.  

Also not really sure what it achieves since I think everyone knows it was a royal fuck up. 

performance of the ref was irrelevant.  Should we have had a penalty in the 89th minute?  Yes.  Should we have been 1-1 in the 89th minute?  No fucking chance.

the ref wasn't great, but apart from the penalty for the challenge on Smeltz, there wasn't a great deal he got massively wrong.  For me, it wasn't a penalty in the first half, and the possible red card for the challenge on Wood in the 2nd half is one that wasn't a shocking decision (it should have been a red, but if an NZ player made a similar challenge against Italy and it was only a yellow card we would have been saying something along the same lines as the NC players and fans are probably saying now - "stupid challenge but not malicious - a yellow is fair"). 

the ref didn't have a great game, but in no way should that deflect anything from our performance which is the massive issue here.

On a side note, the challenge on smeltz is not that different from the red card for Nani and the challenge from De Jong in the World Cup final - players with only eyes on the ball but having a raised boot that could be dangerous.  For de Jong and the NC player, nothing was given and everyone was outraged, while for Nani a red card was given and everyone was outraged.

Have been been told that the ref admitted his performance was poor.

Ref looked amazingly nervous before kickoff...if he is the best Australia has then you can see why Australia has been overlooked for WC referees in the past

One more time for Feverish......

"we are a bigger, better funded nation, with better players than NC  I think that it is difficult to argue with that, and that it is also a relevant point when you are discussing the game." 

Greenie, I know they have improved. But after the world cup and the injection of cash we certainly should have improved too. What I am saying though is why when we have better players than them, more money and more funding, more players, better infrastructure etc are we having to resort to larry longball to beat them and look like a worse team?  

the reason I say the result should be a given is that we have far better players than the rest of the other teams.  Maybe at junior levels it's a more even playing field where they are massive, it's tournament football etc.  But we should be sailing through qualifying here

You're right. Wood, Smeltz and Barbarouses should have all buried easy chances before then. And we also should have had a stone cold penalty in the first half. Is any of that Herbert's fault? Is any of that down to bad tactics or poor selections? No, it's just the way it goes sometimes. It's also exactly how we managed to get through the 2010 WC undefeated. We should understand better than anyone what an underdog can achieve when they get a bit of luck. Long ball might not be pretty but I still think it was the right choice against NC, and at the end of the day it got the job done.

The current situation is almost exactly as it was in 2008/09. We got through the Oceania Nations Cup undefeated (apart from the dead rubber against Fiji) but without exactly setting the world on fire. Everybody was pissy as fuck and thought we would get dicked in Bahrain, and we should have, but we rode our luck and then managed to get past them in a close one at home.

That's exactly how it's set up again this time and I'm really no more or less confident than I was then. The really key match is the first leg of the inter-continental play-off away. And in that regard all this angst about tactics is a complete waste of time. With the players we've got even Guus Hiddink would choose to set up very defensively and pump long balls forward in the hope of Smeltz scoring off a Wood knock-down. Why worry about trying to play through midfield now when that's the last thing we're going to do? McGlinchey and Rojas are fantastically talented midfielders but there's only two of them and they are not good enough to carry that change of game plan on their own, especially not away from home.

Edit: As has been noted before the player we really miss at the moment is Simon Elliott. If Keat or Payne were more obvious candidates for that role I would be more inclined to criticise Herbert's choice of tactics.

style of football aside - money and population isn't the be all and end all of getting results. If it were then you wouldn't see USA losing to Honduras or Jamaica drawing with Mexico in qualification games. Or the Nix even competing. NC had some decent players up top and in midfield. At the end of the day we have won all our games and qualified with a game still to play. If your point is that we play like poo more often than not and lump it into Wood then I won't argue. However if you think any result in football can be a foregone conclusion then I'd have to disagree.

so against a team we are significantly better than (man for man) we created 3 chances in about 88 minutes (Barbarouses chance was in injury time).    We should not have had a stone wall penalty in the first half - it was one of those things where sometimes it is given, and other times it is not.  Personally I don't think it was a penalty.

We played a terrible formation, with a number of players in positions that they are either not equipped to play in (Killen in centre midfield) or in positions that do not utilise their skills........and they are not equipped to play in (Brockie at left wing back).  The tactics can be excused - if we think that we are going to need to play the long ball game in the play-off then we might as well get used to it - but that performance can't.  Despite the problems with the formation, etc, a number of players were terrible.  All of this "oh well, we won and everything else will sort itself out" is just ignoring the obvious - we are not a very good team with a very bad manager.

We were given Asias throw aways and it showed.

In my opinion, red card penalty for the Smeltz incident and red card for the kick on Wood. Not a pen in the first half and a few others posting at the time said the same.

IMO the ref was just as nervous as a fat person weighing himself/herself for the first time in a year 

i mean usually he is not that bad surly. in the A league i mean. Two major fuk ups and a few minor ones welcome to football.

I had a thought while lying in bed this morning . How would everyone feel if the refs had to stop the game to check for fouls (video refs ) ? i imagined it would be boring but at least the result would be correct .

Every time i watch an all whites game this thought comes back to me

I'm all for it as long as it can only be done on appeal by the captain and there must be a limit of appeals, or at least a limit on the number of wrong appeals. It would certainly cut the bullshit out of the game too.

Frankie, I only chose to highlight those three misses because they were such obvious examples of:

a) chances that a professional player should put away every time, and

b) variables that a manager simply can't control

We also hit the woodwork twice, had the two penalty shouts and created other chances ranging in quality. So adding the 2 goals that's at least 10-12 very good opportunities to score. Pretty good by any standard and on another day we would have converted 5 of them and suddenly Ricki's a tactical genius, without actually doing a single thing different.

What selections and tactics would you have used to achieve a better result and make certain players play better?

Newsflash: we are not that much better than 2008 (actually 2009 is a better reference point because that's when we picked up Reid and Smith).

But yeah we are not that much better. I know people like to salivate over Rojas and McGlinchey and they certainly add considerably to our midfield attacking options, but that is offset by the loss of Elliott (and even Brown) defensively so it basically nets out. Elliott used to play such a crucial role as the link between defence and midfield that even our attacking options have been compromised somewhat.

So the "we have better players" statement is a bit of a stretch if you ask me. Better players in some positions but not others.

Term - you've got a rip in your couch.  I wonder which postions are NC better than NZ?  Maybe it's their midget goalkeeper, their MMA back four? Maybe it's Betrand Kai that powerhouse of New Caledonian club football....

And that's the guts. We have a far better pool of quality players to choose from yet we are still playing the same type of football. As a long time fan and supporter of the game here is it wrong to want enlightenment at the top? Don't we (the fans) deserve better if it's available? Why should our realistic expectations be lowered by an average coach set in his ways. I don't want to appear disrespectful to Ricki but he is not the future of NZ football.

I agree with everyone on here who, arrogantly or not, expected us to walk away from that game with a clear cut victory. To have come so close to a dismal draw while contributing bugger all to the quality of the game given the level the majority of our team play at was piss poor. Surely the players themselves wouldn't be happy with that performance? If they were they can bugger off as well.

Be interesting to see how the B team responds on Tuesday and whether anything changes tactically now the pressure to qualify for the play off is off.

It might be time to start a "Coaching angst" topic in the All Whites forum... ?

way too much time on your hands

I only got to hear the commentry on Radio live, but from what I heard our play was ala Wimbledon which I think was fine in the past but it simply doesn't work for us in the same way now.

Our current top players are not long ball merchants and to be asked to play that way is setting us up for a fall. If Herbert is really that keen to continue with this tactic he might as well bring back Fallon who suits the style as opposed to Rojas / Keat / Payne etc who are left in the wilderness either on the field or on the sidelines.

New Zealand has outgrown Ricki, both domestically and Internationally with the influx of more diminuitive and technical players.

He has been poor this season in the A-League....like so many of the officals.....[but has been the best over the last few seasons]...he hate's booking players which sometimes works, but he lets just too much go......eg....1. Player trying to stop the 1st goal should have got a yellow..heaps more..plus,Smelt's kick to the head....would expect a Cap 3 ref without lino's to pick this up....but had we had a refs from Oceania who knows what would have happen .??????.

I don't give a rats arse how we play as long as we get through to the WC. What bugs me is that Herbert is dicking the players around with his weird selections and tactics.....half them looked like they had little idea of what the game plan was.

If Herbert thinks that long ball is the best solution to getting through these qualifiers(and I agree that it is) then FFS pick a team that will do the job properly and coach them the right tactics. What we saw against NC was some half arsed long ball combined with selecting our small skillful players. The basis of our last WC succesful side was a rock solid defense with everyone working their socks off closing down space and chasing all match. We combined this with feeding accurate aerial balls to our tall guys....often on the diagonal from 30 to 40 metres out. Absolutely no problem with this as a tactic....and it worked. And IMO it would work against a Panama or a Honduras.

But what we saw last match was a  NC team that repeatedly tore through our midfield like it was not there. Our back 3 looked disorganised. The long ball stuff was inaccurate most of the time.

IMO the back three without Nelsen does not work. Time to go with a back four and play whoever of our CB,s is seen as the most suited in as RB and tell them to defend only and not get forward. We then need to select two of Wood, Killen or Fallon up front. DM is a problem area but probably Ivan and Weemac are our best bet. Weemac has not been great playing deep but he has a big engine and did OK playing in Wellington agaisnt Bahrain. On the flanks pick Rojas and Leo.

If we fielded a side like this...parked the bus, kept it tight, got everyone to work their bollocks off chasing and on attack pumped long balls up to our big guys then we might have a show. If we don't sort it out tactically and selection wise then we will get hammered. 

Strebre went and talked to the All Whites after the match. 

and said?

Can't remember exactly to quote but I think he said (possibly apologised) that he didn't see it. Was he unsighted? Comment from player was effectively that Strebre is first to come out and admit when he's wrong.

Did he talk to the AR?? And could he have "overturned" his original decision in consultation with the AR or was that already too late?

Everyone was miked up. That would imply that the lino did not see it either. It does look like the ref is looking through bodies but I don't think it's that hard a miss. He lost control at the Wood tackle and was flustered from there out. I mean to see a player with his head open and bleeding and just not care, then casually saunter back to check the obvious is the sign of a man off his game and unfocused. I think he bottled it when the pressure went on to make the big decisions and the 1st big one where he need it step up, was the Wood tackle that he had perfect position on. I think had he gotten that one right, the rest would have gone fine for him.

He's set himself back another 3 years. doubt he'll do another international for a while