Have Samoa been a lot more resilient defensively than we thought? Absolutely. Has that had anything to do with us massively over hitting a dozen crosses? Nope
Also given how strange this match has been, I think Samoa is largely immune to the OFC curse of running out of steam in the second half - you can't get tired if you don't leave your own defensive third
I'm actually disappointed with the lack of intent from Samoa to actually try and play or make a pass, just aimlessly thumping the ball up field even the odd occasion when a pass was actually on.
Have Samoa been a lot more resilient defensively than we thought? Absolutely. Has that had anything to do with us massively over hitting a dozen crosses? Nope
And that was evidenced with some Wood frustration at times today. Not enough quality crosses for him to finish off. If we can't do it with utter dominance against Samoa, you just fear we won't make use of our red hot EPL striker when we go back to playing half decent sides.
We were wasteful and overall didn't perform as good as against Vanuatu, but we had a better second half and credit where credit is due to Samoa, Fatu, and the coaching staff.
Will absolutely take the 8-0 win, I would rather see us get a solid scoreline but still see opposition like Samoa put up some fight, then absolutely destroy and humiliate them.
We don't learn too much from this window. We were expected to win both games pretty comfortably, and we did.
No doubt a few quick goodbyes in the sheds from the European based lads before scrambling down to AKL for their Singapore departure. Travel safe lads and see you in March.
The Bazeley post match interview pretty much summed up the general feeling.
Despite excitable Paladin's efforts ('I really enjoyed the game'), straight bat Baze was fairly apathetic, thoughts already elsewhere.
His comments along the lines of - "Did what we had to do. Didn't learn much of use apart from how we need to be better against weaker teams when we have all the ball, faster movement etc. They parked the bus, their keeper made some good saves. We quickly move to focussing on March. We won't judge the players much on these games, we will more be carefully watching now how they go at their clubs"
The Bazeley post match interview pretty much summed up the general feeling.
Despite excitable Paladin's efforts ('I really enjoyed the game'), straight bat Baze was fairly apathetic, thoughts already elsewhere.
His comments along the lines of - "Did what we had to do. Didn't learn much of use apart from how we need to be better against weaker teams when we have all the ball, faster movement etc. They parked the bus, their keeper made some good saves. We quickly move to focussing on March. We won't judge the players much on these games, we will more be carefully watching now how they go at their clubs"
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This game didn't need to be in Auckland, that much is clear
I'd say a bunch of kids have got to see their heroes or add new ones. No injuries. The coaching staff get to work on things and see a few weaknesses and stengths more clearly. And the players build a little more synergy and relationships and understanding of each other's play. While the top pros help set standards and expectations. Its all good.
Sure the grown ups amongst us want to see us play the USA or a half decent other Americas or Euro side and be challenged. And that'll come after we've done the job in Oceania. But for building the profile of the game and getting the team in NZ this is good, its not overly expensive and its not useless for team prep.
I've a rugby mate who we drag along to Phoenix games who, bugger me, watched the Vanuatu game and said actually it was pretty good and NZ scored some great goals. That's how you build the following and appreciation for the side. He'd turn his nose up if we were losing 4-0 vs USA.
Anyway just thoughts and maybe a slightly different perspective.
Ticketek is down. Trying to get myself a ticket and has not been working all morning. Really frustrating
Yeah its been down all day. I bought tickets last week but cant access them in the ticketek app. I see them in there but cant open them or share them etc to get the QR code. I have a feeling its going to be chaos at the gates tongiht (unless people already downloaded their QR codes)
Has there been any comms from anyone about the Ticketek site being down? It feels like there is only going to be about 5,000 people there, but it will take us all about 30 minutes to actually get in.
There were a couple of hundred outside at kick-off.
The incredible thing was their manual procedures involved hand-writing section + row + seat numbers onto tickets as you purchased them at the kiosk when the smart thing to do would've been to do that hand writing earlier in the afternoon and speed up the time of each manual transactioh.
Fortunately NZ did the decent thing and did not score in the first 15 minutes.
