European adventure ideal for All Whites
New Zealand Football should be circling October 9 on its calendar as it looks to keep the All Whites active following their World Cup playoff loss to Costa Rica.
That is when the draw for the Euro 2024 qualifiers is set to take place in Frankfurt, Germany, revealing a bunch of potential opponents for friendlies throughout 2023. Those qualifiers will include six five-team groups, which means there will be six teams with a bye on each of the 10 matchdays from March to November next year (two per window across five international windows).
Locking in matches will be more complicated than simply getting in touch with the teams that have byes and will therefore be available, but that will be as good a place as any for those responsible at NZ Football to start.
It made the most of the same scheduling quirk in November 2019, securing matches against the Republic of Ireland in Dublin and Lithuania in Vilnius – the All Whites’ first European friendlies outside the build-up to a major tournament since 2007.
Going back to that well would be an ideal way to build on the momentum gathered over the past nine months, where the team has played 11 matches – as many as it played in the previous four years combined.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a factor there, keeping the All Whites inactive from 2019 until October last year, but from March 2018 until November 2019, before travel restrictions hit, the team assembled just twice in nine windows for a total of four matches.
NZ Football chief executive Andrew Pragnell recently noted that the costs of assembling have grown as the impacts of the pandemic – and the Russian invasion of Ukraine – continue to be felt. Targeting matches in Europe, where the majority of the most recent All Whites squad, plus a number of fringe players, are based, would be a way to keep them down.
The All Whites are in the unfamiliar position of having games lined up even though their World Cup qualifying campaign has only just ended. They will play Australia’s Socceroos, who qualified for the World Cup by beating Peru in a penalty shootout, twice in September.
The first match will be in Australia on Thursday, September 22, with Brisbane mooted as a venue by the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, and the second will be played at Eden Park in Auckland, on Sunday, September 25.
They have been arranged as a celebration of 100 years of transTasman international football and will be the first All WhitesSocceroos matches since 2011 – a sign football relations between the neighbouring nations are in a positive place, ahead of their joint hosting of the Fifa Women’s World Cup next July and August.
That relationship could prove useful when it comes to securing All Whites’ matches on home soil going forward, with September’s fixture set to be their first home friendly since 2014. Getting a team or teams to travel to play only in New Zealand is a hard ask, but getting two teams to travel to play once in Australia and once in New Zealand might be easier.
March 2023 looms as a window where that could be a possibility, as Australia and a number of its regional rivals will be preparing for the Asian Cup in June that year in a country to be determined.