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For the first time in almost three decades, soccer will emerge from the shadow of rugby to command national attention when New Zealand plays for a World Cup spot on Saturday against Bahrain.
A crowd of more than 35,000 will pack Westpac Stadium – the largest crowd for a soccer match in New Zealand’s history – and thousands more will follow the action on giant screens at other Wellington locations.
The television audience for the Saturday evening match is also expected to break national viewing records and, for the first time in years, soccer has usurped rugby’s premier place on newspaper sports pages and on nightly sports bulletins.
With the All Blacks currently touring Europe, the New Zealand cricket team also overseas and in the annual hiatus between the winter and summer seasons, the World Cup qualifier has delivered the round-ball code an unprecedented chance to shine.
Whether the sport can capitalise on its prominence to permanently enlarge its following in New Zealand, an opportunity which might be dependent on the outcome of the Bahrain match, has been widely debated.
Soccer last enjoyed this level of interest here in 1982 when New Zealand reached the World Cup in Spain for the first time and after a qualifying campaign of 15 matches.
That success coincided with an unprecedented period of trauma for rugby. A tour to New Zealand in 1981 by a racially-selected South African rugby team had deeply divided the nation, leading to the most violent protests in New Zealand’s history.
Rugby’s image had been heavily scarred and many parents removed their children from the national sport and encouraged them into soccer as a safer, less political alternative.
But the sport was ill-equipped to cope with the influx of young players. It hadn’t the coaches or even the playing fields to support large player numbers and it quickly surrendered its new popularity.
The numbers of juniors playing rugby and soccer are now roughly comparative but at senior levels – from high school on – the sports rapidly diverge and rugby’s pre-eminence becomes obvious.
Rugby remains the first-choice sport for Kiwis from teenage years onwards while soccer has a niche following.
Demographic changes in New Zealand have slightly swelled soccer’s popularity but even the most important regional or interclub matches draw crowds of only a few hundred. That makes the scale of the crowd for Saturday’s match even more eye catching.
Demand for tickets was so great that, though the capacity of the stadium was increased by almost 500, thousands of would-be spectators were turned away.
The crowd is so much greater than any that has previously attended a soccer match in New Zealand that it seems unlikely to be reflective of the sport’s core support.
Rather, it seems followers of all sports, and mainly rugby, have been attracted to an occasion which is an exciting novelty.
The domestic rugby season in New Zealand has just ended with the final of the National Provincial Championship, 10 months after it began with the first round of matches in the three-nation Super 14 tournament. Recent domestic surveys have shown rugby fans are increasingly losing interest in their sport because of the sheer number of matches played each year.
After a scoreless draw in the first leg of the qualifying series in Bahrain, the All Whites have a real chance of reaching the World Cup finals for the first time in 27 years.
Although even that owes a great deal to its geographical location and the quirks of FIFA’s qualifying system.
New Zealand has reached this final stage of qualifying for 2010 after winning the Oceania tournament, which pitted it against mostly tiny island nations such as Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and the Solomons.
Until the 2006 World Cup, Australia was also part of the Oceania region and stood as a road block to 83rd-ranked New Zealand’s progress to later stages of qualifying.
Australia’s decision to switch to the Asian confederation – through which it has already qualified for South Africa 2010 – left the door open to New Zealand.
FIFA’s decision that the Oceania winner would then compete with the fifth-placed team from Asia for a place in South Africa was a further boost to New Zealand’s chances. That left New Zealand to face Bahrain, ranked 61st in the world, in a winner-take-all series.
A qualifying path which forced New Zealand through South America, for instance – as Australia faced in 2002 and ’06 – would have likely made South Africa an impossible dream.
New Zealand will therefore achieve an unusual distinction if it manages to qualify. It will likely become the first nation in World Cup history to qualify without defeating a country with a population of more than one million.
Fiji, at 849,000, and Bahrain, at around 750,000, have been the largest of its opponents so far.
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