James Griffin: There's always the Hand of God

Opinion

Right, now that all the hoo-ha about New Zealand qualifying for the finals of the 2010 Fifa World Cup is dying down, it's time to look at what this truly means to the beautiful game of football and what our finals chances actually are.

Obviously, as I'm sure has been pointed out, we will need to find a new team nickname. A team going by the moniker "All Whites" playing in South Africa is not a good look.

Sure, if we get posted to some high-veldt redneck backwater as our group base then we might glean support from a certain sector of the South African population, but I'm pretty sure it's not the kind of support we're after.

Maybe the best solution is to take a leaf from the book of cricket and become the All Beige. We can tell everyone beige is what you get when you mix all the colours of the Rainbow Nation together; and we can guarantee it won't clash with anyone else's strip because, quite frankly, no-one else wants to run around looking like big poos. But of much more importance is whether, having come this far, we are simply going to travel all that way, in June 2010, only to get our arses kicked.

Amazingly, we are not the lowest-ranked team to qualify. In fact both South Africa and North Korea are officially more crap than we usually are at football. Theoretically then, we should be able to waste these guys, but given that South Africa, as hosts, will be pretty fired up, I'm picking North Korea will be our best shot at World Cup glory.

To aid this I'm suggesting that maybe the backroom boys at Foreign Affairs might want to start a campaign on the quiet, letting all North Korean footballers know that if ever they feel like defecting to New Zealand - especially when, say, they've just managed to lose to us at the 2010 Fifa World Cup - that they would be welcomed here with open arms.

Usually I'd frown on corruption in sport but this is Fifa we're talking about here so pretty much anything goes. But match-fixing against impoverished Asian countries isn't going to actually win us the World Cup. No, at some stage we will actually have to face a nation who (a) cannot be bought off with tourist brochures and political asylum; and (b) play at a skill level we can only dream of. We need to plan for this eventuality now because we sure as hell aren't going to beat them in a fair fight on a football pitch. Brazil will, of course, be the hardest nut to crack. This is because they are footballing Gods and we are lead-footed mortals.

Our best shot here, as far as I can determine, is for all our players to change their names to one-word Brazilian footballer names like Smeltzinhio or Fallono or, come to think of it, Nelsen. This may confuse them into thinking they are actually playing another Brazil long enough to treat us with some respect, so we can sneak a goal and then defend by packing the goalmouth with 11 bodies when they wake up to our ruse.

The machine that is Germany can be derailed, in theory, by attacking them where the Germans are weakest: humour. In my plan the New Zealand players will spend the next few months learning German-language versions of very funny jokes. They will then bombard the German players with these jokes during the early stages of the match, leaving them confused, wondering what they are feeling: should they laugh? And if the correct response to this humour is to laugh, should they laugh now, in the middle of the game or later, in the changing room?

While they are thus distracted we should be able to sneak a goal and then defend by packing the goalmouth with 11 bodies ... etc. The overpaid tabloid-fodder that is England, I'm not so worried about. This is because they are England and they have taken choking at World Cups to a level even the All Blacks cannot aspire to. Someone will do something catastrophically stupid and get sent off; the Chelsea players will turn on the Manchester United players; we'll sneak a goal and then defend by packing the goalmouth with ... etc.

All of which leaves only Argentina, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and 22 other teams to figure out strategies for. Luckily, we have a few months yet to work on this but I'm sure our finest footballing brains will come up with a cunning plan for each and every nation destined to fall to the power of the All Beige.

I know, maybe something involving feeding the Spanish dodgy paella on the eve of the game. Yes, that has a certain historical symmetry. I mean, we are going to South Africa, right?