Talking about Vanuatu is only deflecting the issue, at this stage it appears we cheated and have been cheating for a while. We may not have known that we were cheating but we were still cheating.
Vanuatu did not cheat, they may have been a bit ruthless in how they behaved, they may have not been fair, but they did not cheat.
When we get our own house in order, stop cheating, etc. Then we can start talking about other teams being fair or not. But Vanuatu's behaviour is such a non issue when compared to wide spread and systematic cheating through potentially every single representitive team in every single aspect of the game.
It might be semantics, but I don't know if I'd call it cheating if we unknowingly/ignorantly broke the rules.
Cheating implies consciously knowing what the rules are and breaking them.
If I unknowingly broke the law then its not the courts fault that I didn't know it, the onus is on me to know the law. They may go lenient on me because I didn't know what I was doing was illegal, but I still broke the law.
NZF's job is to administer the game, this seems to be a well known rule that lots of countries deal with, including us in the past. Reguardless, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they are simply incompetent and that it wasn't intentional. If it turns out that we broke the rules then we cheated, incompetence is not a valid defense.
And I do feel for them, I don't think we should go on a mad crusade, there are obviously other issues with NZF and having a near 100% staff turnover no doubt doesn't help. But this is a severe fudgeup, potentially the biggest fudgeup in NZ sports history.