New Zealand U-23s - Quali Whites

Yeah but things have moved on. Sadly.

I'm trying to think of something positive to say.... It gives us more time to prepare for the next competition.

If we're banned for a couple of years then Tommy Smith won't have to choose between club and country again for a while

Can't see Hudson hanging around if we cop a ban.

Seriously though it seems there are two paths we can go by (to steal from Led Zep) ;

1. Fight, fight, fight - engage lawyers, spend, spend, spend, deny culpability, etc etc. If our appeal(s) are not successful then we can expect the full weight of FIFA's bloated mass to crush us like a cockroach. Best case scenario is we win the battle on this but lose the war (FIFA will make sure they win either way). Worst case is we cop a significant ban.

2.  We plead 'mea culpa', the ENTIRE NZF organisation heirachy falls on its sword (or, more likely, we have to throw them under the bus) and we throw ourselves at the mercy of FIFA and hope for the best. Best case scenario - no 2016 Olympics or 2015 U17 tournament. Worst case - see worst case scenario above.

NZF really need to play this smart. In fact, with so much at stake I hope that someone higher up the food chain - e.g. Minister of Sport & Rec has a quiet (or not so quiet) word in their ear.

Have we already played qualifiers for those ?

Any ban applied would surely only be to the men's programme right? It would be grossly unfair for the women to be banned as well... unless they have ineligible players too? If the 'have passport, can play' mantra applied for them then they could have issues too. Alternatively, if the women's programme is organised and they understand the eligibility criteria then perhaps the left hand and right hand run separately? Imagine that bombshell if true. "Parts of NZF understand eligibility criteria, don't tell others in the room" More so that the women's team is quite young for the most part. A lot of players could be affected if not born here. That's also got government funding so if that was taken away, that's would be huge.

I think it's safe to say the women's programme may need a nosey at too.

Evan Charlton stated in his radio interview with Glenn Larmer on Racing Sport that the FIFA Ethics Committee's inquiries cover the various women's teams as well as the men's.

So Charlton is saying that there are plenty more examples of cheating to be revealed including the All White who was played without any passport.

As a country we've always have high rates of immigration, due to the nature of where we are and our history (many a NZ player from days gone past would've been ineligible if these current regulations had been in place earlier...)... in the last 20 years, a lot of new New Zealanders have moved here for economic or humanitarian reasons, and many hail from areas where football is their passion... this has enriched our potential playing stocks - but should've been an absolute no-brainer in terms of creating processes and protocols for ensuring they were eligible under FIFA's rules to play for whichever national team they were aiming for... 

It's not like we can sit back and say, "Wow, we've never had to deal with the scenario before of a player not born in New Zealand", so there is no excuse for not having at least double-checked what was required... with so many boy and girls showing the talent to warrant national selection who hail from states or heritage cultures in Africa, Asia, the Middle East etc, not to mention the UK or Europe, then it's farcical we've gotten to this point... if it was one ineligible player, we can try and claim accidental oversight - but if the numbers are as high as Steven Holloway and Evan Charlton are saying, then it's beyond a joke...

I have tried to get a couple of UK journos interested.  One guy Daniel Taylor at the Guardian replied and said he would look into it after initially quoting Art. 6D.  Who knows, might be interesting. 

Pretty sure Bias has left recently?

Piney sums it up nicely: http://www.radiosport.co.nz/opinion/jason-pine-nzf...

"...I find it hard to believe they don't know the rules, especially given All Whites coach Anthony Hudson's worldwide search for eligible players when he first came into the job. When you do that, surely you know what the rules are.

So that leaves us with the scenario where players have been picked to play for our national teams with at least a suspicion - if not full knowledge by management - that they weren't allowed to.

That's not the way to run the elite teams in a national sports organisation.

Imagine if even half of the sixteen players are ineligible.

Imagine what the punishment from FIFA might be.

This could end up being an absolute disaster."

...will we be stripped of '82 World Cup qualification?

pretty sure Cathleen left a couple of months ago - Tracey is still there and Ken (referees) is also correct.

sorry I see this has already been mentioned.

And Futsal World Cup in Colombia.

Do the OFC themsleves have power to suspend a member federation for breaches?

I guess one question to ask is: If NZF had not been so anti OFC for so long, would OFC be in a position whereby they would be 'getting us'?

I guess thats a very much conspiracy thinking view point but if we were solid bed mates, helping OFC and them respecting us, would they be as keen to investigate to the very bottom of the dirty barrel to put us over a barrel? Yes we have broken the rules and as a body, OFC are simply enforcing them but I guess like any business, if you have a hard working employee that is late to work, are you going to hammer them as much as the lazy employee if they are late to work? Its funny how perspectives can potentially change how you act.

Its not the same and I am not suggesting that OFC have it in for us, but I would be intrigued how they would handle this whole saga if the relationship was on better terms.

I would have thought that the OFC would have had to acted upon any challenge raised by a member nation. 

If we were chummy with the OFC and Vanuatu made the same appeal, it would have been completely corrupt of the OFC to not follow through with an investigation.

wonder if player eligibility will mean Hudson will need to crawl back to players he was trying to overlook 

That's possible Greenie, but I think the issue is - will he even be able to field a side in the foreseeable future?

Or will he have a need to?

So all it would take is a 12 month ban to see us miss OFC Nations Cup & World Cup Qualifying, and then as a result World Cup & Confed Cup, and that is just the senior side. 

That’s an astute observation…. NZF could argue it was one mistake made 16 times essentially say we only made one mistake and kept making the same mistake… change of staff very very very sorry please forgive ...

Or you argue we are right and miss read the rules even though we understood them a couple of years ago.

One ban is 2 to 4 years from all FIFA tournaments the other is banned from the Olympics plus say loss of points in other games.

They need to be very careful FIFA have history in these issues and if you guys go hard and claim innocent and loose the penalty will be mega … Let's hope NZF are doing what they are doing for the right reasons not just to keep their jobs a few months longer.

As an aside given FIFA links to the Olympics and National bodies associated with the Olympics like Hockey etc the flow on effect to other sports if this goes really pear shaped could be significant and kinda make NZF the life of the party at the annual sports awards night never mind the media attention. 

Here's some interesting factoids about the scale of things which to my mind throws the FIFA rules around eligibility as they currently stand (and appear to be interpreted) into some serious question around sanity. 

• around 25% of the NZ resident population was born overseas
• approximately 13% of NZ resident kids aged under 19 were born overseas 
• that adds up to 147,510 kids who under current rules are ineligible to play for NZ
• from Sport NZ Youth Survey data its possible to estimate that  around 60% of kids (both boys and girls) in any particular year have a go at Football in one form or another. So that's around 90,000 kids with some interest in Football - none of whom can't ever play for NZ until they are 23 unless they go through some sort of vaguely defined unspecified 'exemption' process
• that can't be what these rules are for.

Why would any New Zealand 'immigrant-kid' bother playing football with any aspiration towards elite level? The pathway for them seems somewhat murky to say the least. 

Stats like these are probably very similar in countries which are attractive to immigrants for one reason or another - it would be even worse in Australia where 28% of residents were born overseas (around 13% in the UK and 20% in Canada). Hardly likely that all that immigration by hundreds of thousands of people is going to be based on football-driven human trafficking. 

It seems to me that with Stats like this the FIFA rules at they currently framed were not clearly thought out and are in fact just plain ridiculous - especially for 'high-immigration' countries like NZ, Australia. If nothing else good comes out of this I hope some common sense is applied at FIFA to making some changes. Otherwise large numbers of 'immigrant kids' can never play for the countries where they have lived most of their lives and are legal citizens. 

Whatever you think of NZF, OFC, FIFA etc - that's just wrong. 

And just to add - I don't think very highly of Vanuatu Football for taking the path to win through lawyers after the match - maybe its technically correct if you live in a litigious world where anything goes as long as its 'legal' - but to my mind Vanuatu's actions were morally low. They could have raised the matter in advance and if necessary then had the game without Deklan or any 'questionable players' playing - but they went for the post-game' ambush instead after losing on the field. I noted Fiji said they wouldn't have done that, so I'm really glad they beat Vanuatu who to my mind played 'dirty pool' here. For those who say 'rules are rules' I'd say that 'legal' isn't always 'right'.

There maybe a call for changes as a result of this.

Interesting numbers but this "Why would any New Zealand 'immigrant-kid' bother playing football with any aspiration towards elite level?" assumes playing for New Zealand would be the fulfilment of aspiring to play at an elite level. It's more likely 'immigrant kids' aspire to play for Barcelona, or dare I say it, even someone like Ipswich Town before they would NZ.  Plus these kids have a different passion for football than most NZ born kids that play.  So personally I don't think a ban is going to stop 'immigrant kids' wanting to play.

So is New Zealand is the only country which is in the headlights.No way are we the only country with these issues,begs the question why. 

There have been calls for change - and they haven't gone through. That says something.

There's two things the way I see it:

1) In the grand scheme of things, the collateral damage that strikes countries like NZ isn't really a biggie for FIFA - cynical manipulation of citizenship laws to artificially create competitive sides is. Which leads us to

2) Even if the exemptions process isn't transparent (and there may be both valid and dodgy reasons for that), it does exist, and our neighbours Australia have gone through it with both Ibini and Mabil in just the last few years. So it's not impossible for players in Wynne's situation to become international footballers for their new country before they're 23, they just need to belong to a diligent national association who will follow the regulations and attempt to gain clearance by demonstrating that they're not looking to abuse them, rather than simply ignoring them as too much work and going on their own merry way regardless.

And what if it turns out that NZF knew about the eligibility rules all along but tried to get away with it? 

Whether they deliberately tried to get away with something or were just plain incompetent, NZF are the ones in the wrong.  I don't care when the protest was made, Vanuatu shouldn't be blamed for calling us out on it.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c...

Jose Figueira who led the New Zealand side to the Under 17 World Cup never suspected any of his players were ineligible but admitted that he didn't have a full understanding of the Fifa regulations.

Like he said, it was the high performance department's job to sort out eligibility etc. Not his.

NZ Football may be technically in the wrong (whether deliberately or through error) as the rules are written but that doesn't make Vanuatu's actions 'right' in my book. They could have raised it before the tournament and it could have been sorted out so things were decided on the field but instead they waited until they'd lost and then raised it as a 'get out of jail free' card. Their approach caused a lot of unnecessary harm all round to lots of innocent players that could have been avoided by a pre-tournament approach. They had that choice - at the end of the day they chose to do it post-match to get out of their loss on the field. A very selfish action.

The way things are, if they raised the eligibility issue before the tournament we may have been unable to send a team over at all.

From what I've seen the kids of new immigrants are very proud of their new country and representing it is pretty much the ultimate in 'making it'. But whatever the workings of people's heads - the whole thing is blatanty wrong.

I think that's a very one-sided look to it - it's just as equally common for immigrant kids to want to play for their country of origin.

Something that crossed my mind today is that a lot of countries have to work out the eligibility of players because in the last 25 years especially due to the ease of travel and ease of information via the internet there has been an awful lot of migration taking place.  If other countries have been able to keep their noses clean with respect to eligibility why havent we?. 

You'd have to wonder about Australia with 28% of residents born overseas - that's got to add up to many more  thousands of overseas-born 'immigrant kids' than live in NZ.