Halberg Awards

It is why football � still soccer to most � must be recognised and embraced as the world�s most important game, even by those New Zealanders who don�t much like it.

We all now know that, by that definition, this game�s pinnacle prize, the World Cup, is the hardest in sport to win or even come close to winning or to even just to compete.

And we want to compete. We want to, badly.

Thanks to some quirky turns in our social history, in the second half of the 19th Century we botched it when we came to some forks in the road and, unlike most other nations, chose to embrace sports which many decades later were found to be internationally irrelevant.

In these sports, primarily the rugby sports and netball, we at various times became unbeatable as a nation.

And we rejoiced in that. But then, relatively recently, the penny suddenly dropped: being an elite nation in these things was a bit too easy. We wanted to compete in something harder, something in which the whole planet actually competes, and that �harder� could only mean football and its World Cup.

7 months ago, after New Zealand surged and fought its way into the World Cup, our politicians began to talk about ticker-tape parades for our boys in the capital.  Some scoffed, including some within the football community.  But the notion that we should so celebrate a New Zealand team for finishing an international tournament without winning a match (albeit undefeated) does tell you much about our desperate need to achieve in this race of monumental global relevance.

It�s a challenge we now love more than any other, not because it�s easy but because it�s hard.

Thankfully our players, and their coach, now know this. This was not the group that trekked to Spain in 1982 as a brave and heroic bunch, sweetly and correctly buoyed by having made it.

This lot, which makes a living from football professionally, and to whom pressures of expectation are an everyday thing, now has the belief in its capacity to challenge all comers.

As a national football team, New Zealand shed its complexes during June 2010, ever since its best players emerged out of the World Cup undefeated. It now has a faith added to a desire, as its efforts against that mogul nation, Italy, testifies.

And despite the cynics, pessimists and skeptics who still abound among us of course, we too should share and celebrate in this faith discovered during those two weeks of June 2010.  For when New Zealand does qualify next for the world's gr8est stage, our opponents should and will be aware.