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New Zealand supporters celebrate at the end of the World Cup Group F soccer match between Italy and New Zealand at Mbombela Stadium in Nelspruit, South Africa, Sunday, June 20, 2010. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)
The All Blacks centre Conrad Smith stayed up all night a couple of days before the Test against Ireland to watch the All Whites draw with Slovakia. And the New Zealand Prime Minister was at Nelspruit in South Africa to see the All Whites win (in New Zealand eyes) a 1-1 result from the football powerhouse Italy.
The All Whites progress in the 2010 World Cup has captured the attention of all New Zealanders whether they play football or have played the game, or not.
The fact that Italy had to resort to a dive to gain a crucial penalty, which was converted, resonated with New Zealanders with a passion due to their country’s sporting history. A similar act of bastardry on the part of the home side – and incompetence or worse by the referee – stopped the iconic 1905 All Blacks from recording an unbeaten tour of the UK and France when Wales dragged an All Blacks try-scorer back into the field of play before the referee arrived on the scene.
Getting back to the All Whites, the controversial penalty for Italy reinforces the traditional chip-on-shoulder New Zealand attitude going back to 1905, in whatever sport, that the referees are always against them.
There is a great affection for football in New Zealand, outside of the ranks of the true believers, even from diehard rugby union supporters. By way of contrast, this does not apply to rugby league. While many of the players like rugby league (Dan Carter and Piri Weepu are two admirers), rugby union people in New Zealand tend to dislike the league code.
This mainly relates to the way its officials and league tragic journalists are forever bashing rugby union. Football supporters, for their part, have honoured the traditions and success of the All Blacks, as the nickname given to the national football side indicates.
Football was played in New Zealand before rugby union. But when Auckland, the entrepreneurial and population centre of New Zealand, became a rugby province in 1873 rugby union became the national game.
But football was survived around the country and especially when strong personalities with good administrative skills became involved. Places like Gisborne, for instance, have been football power houses in their day. The knock-out national football competition, the Chatham Cup, was a major sporting event in New Zealand up to the 1970s. As a kid, for instance, I remember going to many Chatham Cup finals at the Basin Reserve, Wellington, which were invariably played to full houses.
In the 1950s football got a great charge from the influx of migrants from the UK, especially. Many of these migrants found work on the wharves and the Watersiders and Settlers clubs in Wellington quickly became a successful and iconic teams.
In 1982 New Zealand sent its first team to a football World Cup tournament in Spain. There were popular visits from all-star teams which packed out the Basin Reserve. But there were too many officials with Scottish accents to impress the general New Zealand public. Interest in the game died away.
The advent of pay television with its coverage of the Premier League, visits to New Zealand of stars like David Beckham (whose second tour, though, was a financial flop), the rise of the ‘soccer mum’ culture and more recently the success of the Wellington Phoenix club in the A-League has seen the demographics of the football players in New Zealand change significantly.
Increasingly the officials and the players at all levels in the game talked in New Zealand accents. It is significant in this respect that Winston Reid, the scorer of the first goal scored by the All Whites in a World Cup tournament, is a Maori.
With the Kiwisation of New Zealand football has come the development of a playing style that reflects the New Zealand character and physique. The All Whites play football the way the All Blacks play, especially in their attritional days, might have played the game.
Against Italy, for instance, The Observer noted that the All Whites defended ‘like giants’. The reference intrigued me for some decades ago The Observer referred to the All Blacks as ‘unsmiling giants’.
The Italian media referred to the All Whites as ‘a team of excellent athletes, but mediocre footballers.’
This is also interesting because it gets to the heart of how New Zealanders play their sport and why they have been so successful in so many different sporting arenas.
The New Zealand character tends to under-stated and laconic. New Zealanders tend to be skeptical of individualists. They tend to be physical rather than cerebral in the way they play games. They like to quote the mantra that a champion team will defeat a team of individual champions. New Zealanders, too, tend to produce big athletes.
Finally the football authorities in New Zealand have accepted that if the country is to be successful at football (currently the All Whites are ranked 78th in the world), they have to adopt a style that suits the New Zealand character and physique. The All Whites side is noticeably bigger and more aggressive than the other teams in its pool round.
This makes its long ball game far more potent than when it is played, say, by less athletic teams. Against Slovakia and Italy the cross into the congested area in front of the goal posts induced all sorts of panic, bordering on fear, from the defenders as they contemplated the charge towards them and the ball of big New Zealand attackers.
There is one other aspect to the way the All Whites play football that should be noted. The writer John Mulgan in a famous essay “Report on Experience” noted that one of the defining characteristics of New Zealanders was that they had ‘the versatility of practical men.’
This penchant for the practical makes New Zealanders intense competitors. There is no use playing games if you don’t try your hardest to win them. And New Zealanders will often find ways to win that might not be conventional. The Guardian by describing ‘the resourceful display’ by the All Whites against Italy made an appropriate and insightful comment in this respect.
I was intrigued, for instance, to note that Winston Reid, the scorer of the historic goal against Slovakia, was a defender. I looked up the record of that peerless defender, the longtime England captain, Bobby Moore. He never scored a goal in any important international match, aside from a goal in two friendlies.
This gets us back to point about the ‘versatility of practical men.’ Just because Reid was a defender it did not mean that he saw himself as having no responsibility about scoring goals.
This brings me to make a comparison between the All Whites and the Socceroos. A large part of the All Whites success and popularity with all New Zealanders is that they are seen as a New Zealand team. Their management is New Zealand. The players are virtually all New Zealand born. But most of all, the team plays in a way that reflects the New Zealand character.
Robbie Slater had a very pertinent point to make about the Socceroos after their dismal performance against Germany: ‘It was un-Australian … You at least have to go out and try and win the game and we never did that.’
With two draws, the All Whites are looking to sneak into the next round with a win against Paraguay. Already the newspapers in New Zealand are running stories covering all the various possibilities of how the All Whites can progress in World Cup 2010. This embraces, even, the possibility of a FIFA bureaucrat picking a name out of a hat.
The All Whites have put themselves into this position, and got the nation behind them, because they have brought a touch of Kiwi to the way they have played in the World Cup tournament.
More power to their boots.