Ricki's already said he's leaving at the end of this cycle, no? I'm sure I read something a while back from the horses mouth on that. Ricki's future is obviously a matter for him but I think he needs to take a year off and completely rethink his approach to the game - he does have experience which shouldn't be discarded but he's had both the top coaching jobs in NZ and right now he's looking like sliding out of both having undone all the good work he did in the early part of both jobs looking like he's run out of ideas. Playing the football he does right now, who other than NZF would actually employ him - there has to be an element of self preservation there as well.
I personally think we have a lack of experienced midfielders which has been exacerbated by the fact players have been preferred there out of position. I'd have been encouraging Tim Payne to leave Blackburn and find a club where he's going to play first team football and guarantee him a run of games if he did. I also think it's a shame nether Keat nor James featured in the qualifiers when we persisted with Killen in midfield (although I'm not convinced either is quite up to the job actually).
I think it's quite clear that the tyranny of low expectations specifically relates to our place in Oceania.
"We need to overthrow the tyranny of low expectations which meant we accepted struggling through Oceania qualification."
I absolutely maintain that we should be cruising through OFC qualification and we should be able to do so playing better football than our opponents (if we have limitations then what do the island teams have??), notwithstanding the odd away game where we may strike a terrible pitch or terrible ref or other random factor. We have better players and should be better prepared. I think that the improvement in the islands has been completely overstated to cover for two extremely poor campaigns, both the Nations Cup in Honiara (which has been done to death) but also the recent qualifiers - and I think coaching was a factor in both of those sequences of matches.
As to the something more, all I want is to see the team coached in a way that maximises the performance levels for a very talented, young group of attacking players. There's absolutely nothing wrong with setting up with a solid base, and in fact if you want to play direct then go ahead - just don't do it when your best attacking players are small and skilful. You cannot be happy with the recent discussion that Marco, clearly our best attacking player, will be left out of the away leg against Mexico because Herbert can't find a place for him in our XI?