All Whites need more than a talking point
It is time to see if these All Whites can produce a performance to back up their talk this week.
Just about every player put up for media obligations during their camp in Wellington used the word ‘‘dominant’’ at some stage to describe how they wanted to play against Fiji, which has come from coach Anthony Hudson wanting them to shed the underdog tag which he felt they had hidden behind in the past.
Good on them for aspiring to be better, but without a performance to match in Lautoka today it will appear to many to just be bluster.
For Hudson, it will be a balancing act between wanting to dominate and getting the four points from that match, and the return
match in Wellington on Tuesday, they need to make the next stage of World Cup Qualifying.
‘‘Four points obviously gets us through, so four points is success for us, however, we’re not thinking about going there and getting a
point.
‘‘The mindset for the game is to go there and dominate and impose ourselves on the opposition and win the game.
‘‘But we also know that there is another team involved, and we’re away from home and there are many different factors in that, so one thing is for sure, we will be very, very, very organised, we’ll have a great work ethic and the objective is for us to get through to the next round and nothing else.’’
Hudson has left himself a bit of wriggle room there for the classic ‘‘got the job done’’ line if they are forced to eke out a tight win today.
After all, New Zealand will have to combat 30+ degrees Celsius temperatures, high humidity, possible thunderstorms and a potentially bumpy pitch at Churchill Park, not to mention a physical Fiji side.
So there would be scope for allowing a battling All Whites performance, but they have said they don’t want to settle for that, meaning they need to be held to a higher standard.