Buckingham’s exit locked in early – NZF
New Zealand Football was of the view that Des Buckingham would not be coaching the OlyWhites at the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics from the moment they were postponed at the end of March.
Buckingham had been contracted to coach the under-23 men’s national team until the end of August, while All Whites coach Danny Hay was set to take on that responsibility from September 1.
Hay will now coach the team in Tokyo, provided the Olympic Games go ahead next year. ‘‘The only decision to be made was whether there was going to be any activity between now and 31 August,’’ NZ Football chief executive Andrew Pragnell said yesterday.
‘‘When the Olympics were postponed, there was a decision made in August [2019, when Hay was appointed] that already kicked into gear.
‘‘It was an opportunity to get the lay of the land on international activity over the next three to four months and to check whether there were any other opportunities for Des in the organisation as well.’’
It took five weeks from the postponement of the Olympics on March 24 for NZ Football to communicate its decision on the coaching role to players and the public, but Pragnell stressed Buckingham was aware from early on.
‘‘We were in early dialogue with Des from the outset. There’s been lots of conversation back and forth and it’s been positive.
Buckingham joined NZ Football at the start of 2018, returning from England to coach the national under20 men’s team through to the World Cup in Poland last May and June.
When former All Whites coach Fritz Schmid resigned at the end of June, Buckingham was appointed as the coach of the OlyWhites through to the end of the Tokyo Olympics, which were originally scheduled to take place this July and August.
He led a patched-together squad to the gold medal at the Pacific Games in Samoa last July, then took a much-changed squad at the OFC under-23 championship, which they won in record-breaking fashion to secure their place at Tokyo.
This year, he was set to take charge of the All Whites – which would have effectively been the OlyWhites – at the OFC Nations Cup in Auckland in June, before the team headed to Japan at the start of July, but the Covid-19 pandemic scuppered those plans.
Pragnell said he was ‘‘gutted’’ for Buckingham, but was confident this was the right course of action for NZ Football to take, even though it had generated a strong reaction amongst some in the football community.
‘‘We’ve got an enormous amount of respect for Des and what he’s achieved to date, and he’s been an absolute professional. It’s about understanding that historically this has always been a single role and the decision to reintegrate this as a single role was made last year.’’
The All Whites and OlyWhites roles were not combined for the 2008 and 2012 Olympic campaigns, but were integrated in 2014, when Anthony Hudson was appointed, and remained the way in 2018, when Schmid was appointed.