What New Zealand Football needs from its next manager

When the final whistle blows in Wellington on 20 November 2013 two things will almost certainly have happened.  Mexico will have qualified for the 2014 FIFA World Cup and Ricki Herbert's reign as All Whites manager will be over.  Assessment of his tenure can wait until such a conclusion, but planning for the future needs to start now.  The task will fall to the discredited New Zealand Football board, in all likelihood under the influence of Frank Van Hattum and Fred de Jong, to appoint a replacement.  What then for the role beyond 2013 - how do we manage the task of rebuilding a diminished side when the memories and money generated by World Cup qualification in 2010 have disappeared?

Ricki Herbert; sad

This modern All Whites team are almost entirely a Herbert creation, but the current state of the national side reflect the diminishing returns his one note coaching style has generated.  For both club and country Herbert succeeded in building a were raised.  His continuation with the 3-4-3 system for the All Whites, at times necessitating some bizarre positional selections has at times veered towards deliberate provocation - a rejoinder to critics.  This is the man who conquered Bahrain, never forget - a symbolic "show me your medals".  But letting the system govern the players has resulted in complete confusion - including it seems in Herbert, the brutalist 3-4-3 was a particular response to the strengths of the available players and a concentration of talent amongst central defenders and physical strikers, not a coherent approach replicable with another set of players.

Tactically, the first job for the new man will be to revise that style of play.  New Zealand does have a more complete collection of attacking players than at any time since the 1980s - McGlinchey, Rojas, Barbarouses, Wood, Henderson, Brockie and Smeltz could all conceivably be starting for their clubs and scoring goals this season.  But New Zealand sides will always suffer in an area of the pitch, currently fullback and defensive midfield - mean the job of the manager will require

This is not a job for idealists or ideologues looking to impose a pre-conceived tactical framework, dreams of "combination play" and midfield rotation must be subservient to an element of pragmatism.  

Marco Rojas; skillz 

The All Whites are in a strange situation, we start almost every international fixture as underdog and can expect to spend much of every match we play without the ball, other than in Oceania where we're strong favourites and must dominate the play. The requirement for a style of play flexible enough to adapt to either scenario is a challenge but has to be developed.  Watching New Zealand out-passed by New Caledonia in Dunedin, able only to achieve an unsatisfying victory through an aerial blitz, was a kind of humiliation.

The end of this campaign should bring a major turnover in the playing group.  While Herbert used more than 65 players in his last 60 matches in charge, he was in many respects an anti- reactionist .  The majority of competitive fixtures included a core group of whom Leo Bertos, Tony Lochhead, Chris Killen, Ivan Vicelic, Ben Sigmund and Rory Fallon are all nearing the end of their contributions.  Expect a spate of retirements or if this doesn't eventuate, the swift ending of some long careers.

Rory Fallon; elbows

To my mind, the coach of the Senior Men should also take this side to the Olympics, primarily because of the likely cross-over between the two. Storm Roux, Bill Tuiloma, Louis Fenton, Tyler Boyd, Alex Rufer, Matthew Ridenton, Luke Adams, Harry Edge, Ryan Thomas, Tim Payne and Cameron Howison are all eligible for Rio in 2016, at professional clubs and should figure for the All Whites at some stage before 2018.  ASB Premiership players should be selected when absolutely necessary - our international prospects will only improve when all of our squad are making regular appearances in professional football.

Qualification for future World Cups will continue to prove extremely difficult, Bahrain was an outlier - New Zealand's World Cup appearances will be so infrequent that coaching performance should not be measured in World Cup cycles.  Herbert convinced us that only one result counted, and that was the intercontinental playoff.  He engineered a free pass for results in other matches - too late it seems we realised that the Honiara debacle indicated a downward trajectory that reflected his lack of new ideas.  We need to overthrow the tyranny of low expectations which meant we accepted struggling through Oceania qualification. Performance levels need to be maintained in each of the major international tests - OFC Nations Cup, Oceania World Cup Qualifiers, Olympic Games and the Confederations Cup - and if they're not we'll never qualify for the World Cup anyway.

The kiwi football fan is a realist - we know our place in the football world (even if we allow ourselves dreams of glory from time to time).  Whomever takes on the mantle of New Zealand football manager will not have unachievable expectations - all he needs to do is to develop a talented group of players into a football team we can be proud of.

Herbert's greatest achievement was gaining credibility, for himself as a coach and New Zealand as an international team.  For New Zealand Football appointing a replacement to restore credibility to a hollowed out institution may be an equally difficult task.