Download Huronia Column April 6

From the Technical Director
It’s 13,000 kilometres from Canada to New Zealand.
Poles apart in distance, but close neighbours in terms of soccer.
In the FIFA world rankings, Canada is 109 and New Zealand 112.
In New Zealand the number one sport is rugby union, so much so that the national team, The All
Blacks, are the world champions and historically the most successful team in sport.
In Canada, the number one sport is ice hockey and Canada is the most successful nation in the
world in that particular sport.
New Zealand has no problem finding talented rugby players. They emerge on a constant basis,
each batch often better than those who have gone before them.
Canada has a regular flow of talented hockey players.
In both cases, the two sports are culturally ingrained in the psyche of the nation.
What both countries are not so good at, at least in the case of men, is soccer.
In that area they struggle to make their mark.
Both nations are trying to remedy that shortfall and improve their soccer pedigree.
Chances are that if the two nations played a home and away series, each one would get a
narrow win on their home soil.
In terms of international soccer, New Zealand has qualified twice for the World Cup finals,
Canada once.
Both have determined that such a record is not good enough. Each country would like to get
there again and in fact, make a habit of qualifying.
What makes both nations even more interesting in their effort to improve their soccer fortunes is
the way they are trying to go about finding a solution.
The philosophies of both are pretty much the same, get every kid to love the sport for life, put in
place a long term development plan for players and coaches and hope that the result will be an
increase in the talent pool and subsequently an increase in success for the men’s teams.
As against hockey and rugby union, where the talent base is a fabric of the community, soccer
is not the sporting culture of choice.
As such, some would say soccer players have to be manufactured, while the hockey and rugby
enthusiasts can be nurtured.
In my mind, there is a big difference between manufacturing and nurturing talent.
In New Zealand and Canada there are huge pools of youngsters who need no persuasion to
choose hockey and rugby as their number one passion.
But in terms of soccer, both nations need to some extent to persuade kids to play soccer.
Here are a few tidbits from the New Zealand document.
“New Zealand should adopt a proactive, effective, possession-based style of play.”
“New Zealand needs to develop ‘special’ match-winning players.”
“The challenge for the novice coach is to evolve from someone who searches the internet for
football exercises thus displaying a copy culture, into the expert professional coach who creates
the learning environment that suits their players and ‘brings to life’ their own or the national
vision and philosophy.”
“Don’t waste football time with non-football related activities.”
“Football Training = Football Conditioning. Football Conditioning = Football Training.”
Both countries driving down the same road in similar cars hoping to steer themselves to the
same destination - the World Cup.