I'm totally cool with talking about how NZF and the Phoenix could be better aligned, and how NZF can do a much better job with the All Whites etc etc. In fact, I welcome the amount of airtime these important issues are currently getting.
But one of the very first questions Gareth (or anybody else) should have to answer before getting anywhere near the Board is "what is your plan for grassroots football and delivering to the 100k+ NZF members who play, coach, ref, administrate and watch football for basically social and health & wellbeing reasons?". It's an important question because that is still NZF's main fucking job and those people are NZF's biggest and most important group of stakeholders.
Although it may not always seem like it it's those 100k+ people who actually "own" the game and elect representatives to the District Federation and NZF Boards to make decisions on their behalf. Which in turn makes this idea that the NZF Board needs to be "more professional" an interesting one. Yes, of course you want the most qualified and capable people on the Board but the game in NZ is still largely an amateur one and needs to be governed by people who understand that and place importance on it. Articulating the problem as Gareth did ("I can't stand amateur committees and I would describe NZF as amateur in the extreme") shows a real lack of understanding of NZF's core purpose.
The issue is how you best balance the demands of the amateur/grass-roots and professional/high-performance parts of the game, which is something that pretty much all national sporting organisations struggle with. But coming at the problem from purely one of those directions, or on the assumption that one is inherently more important than the other, simply won't work.