Today's DomPost. Page C6.
Fred Woodcock spoke to Ryan Nelsen. Ryan was talking about tournament preparation. Wasn't hard to agree with his general direction BUT just how much money does he think NZF has? This is not a rich game in NZ and we don't have great financial resources. I'd love to here of a solution...
Taken by this - 'but unfortunately there's nobody at New Zealand Football who thinks on an elite level when it comes to international football'.
link to above is http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/olympics/football/7404448/Ryan-Nelsen-wants-coach-Emblen-kept-on
Opt out of games through 'injury',come here for the big games,criticize everything,go back to England.
That a good summary of his international career?
So if NZF had organised a three-month camp in preparation of the Olympics, would Ryan Nelsen have actually turned up for it?
Tegal and El Grapadura have summed it up.
If we had won the OFCNC then we would have had an extra US$1million or whatever it was from the Confeds cup coming to us to help pay for the Olympic prep. Of course we didn't though, and I'm not pointing fingers but maybe if we had had our captain and best player available things might have panned out differently, eh Ryan?
(I know I'm not adding much to the debate here but this pissed me off enough that I felt I had to join in)
People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people.
Ryans comments after the 1 nil loss against Belarus
http://www.radiosport.co.nz/player/ondemand/606513162-nelsen-praises-oly-whites--effort
Ryan Nelsen can be both (a) entirely correct in that our administrators aren't up to it and (b) massively hypocritical for not turning up in the Solomons.
In the end unless you think he has a massive agenda against Ricki (which I'm sure some people do believe but seems odd considering he continues to play for him) then he's probably worth listening to.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/soccer-football/news/article.cfm?c_id=86&objectid=10829497
Sounds like the coaching staff were in a pretty average situation and that the governing body needs to take responsibility for agreeing to a pretty ridiculous tournament. Still not convinced by comments at the time that there wasn't anything we could have done differently once we were out there. If so, that's a pretty depressing judgement on the state of NZF i.e. we couldn't have won that tournament in any way.
Fair enough to keep all the coaches on board as it's a bit late to start changing the programme but I think there should be changes at player level.
Normo's coming home