OFC Nations Cup 2016 - vs New Caledonia | Wed 8 Jun | 5.50pm | SS Popup

Fudge, this post has gotten me right angry.  6 years ago we drew with Italy at the World Cup and people are happy because we held on against New Caledonia?  It is so clear where this is heading, another waste of good players and time, and money and effort.  The guy is just not up to it, that much is clear.  Well done, talked your way into a job but someone at the top needs to ask some tough questions.  Are we moving forward?  Where is the direction vs what was promised?  Here are some quotes from his initial interview.  Where is he on the standard he set for himself?

Newly appointed All Whites coach Anthony Hudson is aiming to take New Zealand further in the World Cup than ever before.

Hudson made the comment today after New Zealand Football confirmed his appointment as coach on a contract through until the end of the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

The 33-year-old Englishman - the son of former Chelsea star Alan Hudson - today outlined his vision for the All Whites.

"They [the fans] can expect to see a team that goes out to try and win games,'' he said.

''They can expect to see a team that is organised, but with a real positive attitude, a team that plays football and tries to win the ball high up the pitch.

''Our team will have a real emphasis on being positive going forward and makes the most of the qualities of the players available for selection."

Hudson was unashamedly ambitious.

"A big pull of why I've come here is to go to the World Cup. And not just go to the World Cup, but go further than we've ever gone.

''Along the way to reaching that target, I'm very passionate about playing the game a certain way.

''One of my main attributes is that I'm very, very ambitious and my life is all about football.

''I'm very passionate about coaching and I'm very passionate about helping players. I want try and help players improve so they can have big careers and do well from the game and be able to give back.

''I want to come here and make history and I want the players to make history. There's no point in doing it if we're not going to have those ambitions of doing things we've never done before."

 

rekt m8

Yeah but it is in the Islands and it is really hard and we just want to win blah blah blah blah

Sorry I forgot the Island teams have really closed the gap.  Also it's really hot and the pitches are bad, and did I mention the refs?

Question has a New Zealand men's team (U17 up) lost a game to an Island team since Honiara?  I think the answer is actually no

Nail on the head JD. Hudson talked the good talk with the right accent, had all the coaching badges,  was a power point expert . Seems the only thing missing is an ability to actually coach.

Only because of luck. We don't deserve at least two of our wins. And we need to step it up.

I missed the second half but I heard Hudson wasn't happy in the post match?

Png in final?

Im guessing Hudson must be playing as well as he seems to be the only one getting the blame for poor performances.

At least they'll be tired. AW no excuses.

Looking like it

They'll sure give our wide defenders something to think about

and a pretty well organised athletic defence as well

plenty of players being bagged quite rightly but half the problem is the teams he is actually putting on the pitch

That was a pretty enjoyable PNG-Solomons semi

If the PNGers have enough left in the tank they will be a handful for us

Plenty of pace, physically will handle us, back six looked in control

Hopefully we get our game together for the final

Impossible to ignore the way they are being asked to play too - very deliberate

If the team for the final isn't

Marinovic

Hudson-Wihongi - Adams- Brotherton

Boxall - Patterson - Tuiloma - McGlinchey - Colvey

Fallon - Wood

I'll be very surprised. Patterson v Rojas the only real ?, once you put yourself in Hudson's shoes. 

Exactly mate. Route one is a valid tactic but it doesn't mean kick it anywhere at anytime - it means hitting a target man with players running off him. We were spraying the ball like an old man in a resthome. 

And how can you play route one with no one on the pitch to run off Wood. There's no point having Wood and Fallon on the pitch at the same time. You need Kosta and/or Patterson/Rojas to run on to the flick ons etc. 

I love our national team but I also love the game of football. As much as I love winning there's no way you can show a replay of that to the team of 7-15 year olds some of us coach and say "this is the AWs, if you train hard etc you could be in this team etc etc". Kids will look at that and go "yeah no thanks". And so will sponsors, media etc.

A win is a win but that was beyond 12 beers ugly.  

Ha love it. Putting our best players on the pitch. A novel idea. Send a fax to NZF- it might make it in time for Saturday. 

Just finished watching the game and catching up on comments.

It felt like no one wanted the ball: no one wanted to play. It constantly felt like we were in the 92nd minute when the first instinct was to clear our lines.

At this tournament I expected us to either 1) dominate teams by holding the ball, closing them down, winning set pieces etc like we did against the Solomans or 2) play them off the park with a 3-4-3 formation and simply win by scoring more goals. I was hoping for 2) from an entertainment perspective but knew we'd get 1).

The issue for me is I never expected to see us have less than 40% of the ball against Fiji, Vanuata and NCL. I didn't realise being effective meant hacking the ball upfield,  stacking the team with slow (seriously slow) non ball players across the park and basically waiting for the opposition to make a mistake.

The Solomans game was the blueprint. Hold the ball, close them down and create chances. It's almost like beaches we only got one goal it was deemed an inferior performance to the other games. But I felt much more confident with that style.

We got lucky today. That was a poor GK error. I almost wish we had lost so that the media would have asked Big Kev for his opinion on losing playing route one (badly) with his son upfront (anon). 

Cards aside you couldn't seriously start Prel, Fallon, Tui and Brotherton again. Just not good enough (personalities and leadership aside).

that's the main thing that Rikki got right in the world cup, figure out how to start your best eleven.

When AH take charge, he nearly kick all the veterans out of his squad, rely on the youth and play the passing, on the ground, and what kind of result he get? Just can't win games. AH is not stupid, he said there are not many real competitive games NZ can play, but the OFC Nations Cup is the one; if he play good football and we can't get the result, the only result I will think is he will lose his job. 

AH and his team should investigate the pitch before the tournament start, they think for us are not able to play on the ground well, and if you have two good 6 ft 4 center forward, Wood and Fallon, and why still play on the ground? When Rojas play there too many tricks and flicks, not really impressed me much. You would know why Fallon is in the squad and start games.

.

The argument about NZ playing shark because of the wind in the first half wasn't borne out by the reality, was it?

New Caledonia played better technical football both halves, but just lacked a finisher. New Zealand played crap football both halves and won from a free kick their keeper should have got.

That was one of the worst games of football I've had the misfortune to watch (this is coming from someone who grew up watching football on Naenae Park).

I'll admit, I was sucked in by the powerpoints, the fluffy language, and wannabe Guardiola dress sense.

But that was beyond dire.

There is very clearly no substance at all behind the hyperbole.

Please, make it stop.

My $10.00 on a Win and $10.00 for NC to go through at the TAB did it. 

The AW football did not,. #LadyLuck won't win the FInal sorry.

Solid work One News

I'm not here to defend hudson, but now isn't really the time to experiment beautiful passing football. We need results and quite frankly thats all that matters now. If we qualify for the confeds cup, we'll have a string of warm up games plus the tournament proper to tinker with, not to mention the cash flow which will help hugely towards to build up. 

Im absolutely disgusted with the football we've been playing this tournament and how we have been played off the park by our opposition in a few games, but when I think of our terrible build up, the youth in this side and the lack of game time from our professionals I'm not really surprised. Tuiloma was shocking, prelavic atrocious, and have been unimpressed with colvey. 

One thing we can blame hudson on is his squad selection but I really don't think he can take it all. These players should be capable of more but they are simply not, I hope hudson has learnt. 

It's not a binary thing.  It doesn't have to be a) lump the ball first time every time or b) Barcelona Tiki-Taka.  There is a middle ground where we can play patiently on the ball. Pass it through the midfield quickly on the counter and use the wingers to attack and knock it in to the bigger forwards, or try to find Chris Woods feet with back to goal and let him use his (clearly superior to everyone else on the field) ability to set up another player or create something for himself, or if we are one goal up and wanting to kill the game for the last 10 minutes try to hold the ball for more than 4 passes rather than just hoofing it and immediately being put under pressure again.

We will never be Barcelona, and we shouldn't try, but it doesn't need to be whatever the hell this is.

I can actually see Hudsons excuses now...

"The fitness testing we undertook in Auckland showed the squad was not capable of playing the brand of football I would have liked so we reverted to a long ball game"

Perhaps if he had of selected a wider training group 2 or 3 months out and set and monitored targets rather than plucking kids from Club matches on Mangere Mountain and outback Victoria he might have been able to achieve that.

Was the build up ideal? Of course it wasn't but with the pre camp camp in Auckland and the pre camp in Brisbane he had the bulk of the squad together for Over two weeks. The players who joined late were all the Senior Pros of the side and capable of adapting and picking up new systems.

The football we are playing is dire, but the worst part of it is that the Island teams are actually dominating us for large parts of games and for the bounce of a ball, a goalkeeper not having a howler we could very easily be in a position of laying like absolute shark and being knocked out of the tournament.

Really shark game of football. While the result is good the product on the pitch was horrendous which doesn't show much progression, in fact we've gone backwards by some way. It isn't a good look for anyone interested in football, from part time/general sports fans to die hards to kids it is a bad advert for NZF. A couple things we can't blame - the ref was really really good IMO especially compared referees seen in OFC comps to date. Secondly the pitch doesn't look great but probably isn't anywhere near as bad as Honiara or what might have been expected - the island nations seem to be able to play decent football on the deck as well.

For all the Hudson hate (and there is plenty to go around), I really have to reiterate that NZF doesn't seem to have learnt anything from Honiara.  The build up to this tournament seems, if anything, worse that the last go round.  When so much of our buildup program relies on the free games, and the money from Confed Cup qualifying, it really needs to do better.

It get's better 

I wouldn't mind the AW's playing route one football if they played it well - there's a brutalist beauty about proper John Beck, Tony Pulis, Big Sam style physical football. 

But they don't play it well.

Just seen the goal. We basically won off Cap 14 level keeping.

The final will be tough i reckon. PNG at home, not easy.

I'm guessing this is a pisstake?

I think this hits it nail on the head. I'd have more sympathy (marginally so) for the 'we just have to win' argument if we were playing an uninspiring brand of football, but doing it effectively, and winning comfortably. The game last night was just dreadful - outside of the first 5-10 minutes, when we created the our only actual goal-scoring chance of the game with Prelevic, the long ball was ineffective. Like people have said, the accuracy was wanting, we didn't really dominate in the air the way you'd expect us to, and NCL were pretty effective at getting numbers to second phase so that they ended up collecting most of the flick ons anyway.

Once it was clear that that wasn't really working, we had nothing else - we couldn't really hang on to the ball to dictate the tempo (Tuiloma was absolutely atrocious), and greadually NCL took control of the game. Our goal was a piece of unbelievable luck - and if at that stage we'd retreated, defended effectively and closed the game out, I don't think I'd have been ecstatic, but at least would have understood the approach. But we couldn't even do that - the only reason they didn't score 3-4 goals in the second half was due to solid work from Marinovic, and lack of composure in front of goal from NCL. And to top it all off, when we were on the ropes defensively and brought on a bit of pace to try to counter-attack, we couldn't even do that. I can't recall a single meaningful counter we had in the entire game. Realistically, if that game had finished 3-0 to them, we'd have no reason to complain about that.

And all this brings me to the question of what's the actual point of all this? Are we just trying to scrape through any old way we can, get a bit of cash from the Confeds and World Cup qualifiers, just so we can go and do the same old depressing cycle again? Or are we actually trying to grow the game in this country?

Just a few thoughts on this game and the overall tournament so far:

• The playing style - been absolutely dire, but my views are as long as the team is winning I'm willing to forget about how they do it. It's certainly not going to be good enough going forward, but for now results are what matter, especially in this game and now the final.
• It would be nice to see us winning every game by 3-4 like we *should* be, but one of the best things about football is that things don't always happen as they *should* happen. It's one of the things that personally I love about it. Look at 2010, we *should* have lost all 3 games. We *should* have lost the Italy game by about 5. But we didn't. This team has been able to find a way to win, even though it hasn't been pretty.
• Last night there's no doubt that NCL were the "better" team. Played better football, created more chances (63% possession, 23 shots to 8). But in a semi final give me the choice of creating more chances, having more shots, having more of the ball and knocking it around the pitch nicely, and losing; or playing some pretty pathetic stuff and winning due to a goalkeeping error; I certainly know which one I would go with
• Also on the stats, these ones don't look to bad: Played 4, Won 4. Scored 10, Conceded 1
• On Hudson - talks a big game, and has he delivered on that? Probably not. But when he took the job his first objective would have been to win the Nations Cup, and we're one game away from doing so. His squad selection raised a few questions, his team selection for last night probably did so as well. But he's one game away from winning the tournament, so has scraped a pass mark from me for his time in charge.

In short: Up to now it's been job done, nothing more. We've been a bit lucky at times, but sometimes you just have to take that and move on.

 

The current AWs make Ricki's AWs look like a carefully planned, well implemented, tacitcally thoughtful side which made the absolute most out of the playing resources available to it.

The only thing Hudson is really achieving in his time at the helm is to highlight just what Ricki did with what he had.

For me, it's not that we are not winning by plenty of goals, it is how we are playing. I was (somewhat) satisfied with the Solomon's game, because there was some identifiable style other than kick and hope.

I knew it. Soon, in clubrooms all around NZ, posters of Ricki will appear captioned: MISS ME YET?

That's the thing, we've seen glimpses of the way Hudson wants to play. I think I remember in the last couple of friendlies the same thing - a positive start playing a good pressing game. 

What's the pitch looking like? Well I suppose it doesn't matter as we don't use it anyway. But humour me.