Michele Hewitson Interview: Ricki Herbert

Ricki Herbert has a head full of lists. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Ricki Herbert, coach of the All Whites, dreamer and former mad man, is having his lunch, alone, at SkyCity, in a room full of players and management. He's waiting to see me, which is presumably why nobody is sitting at his table.

Still, that's a good enough image: the coach as man alone, the true believer in the odds, against all odds. He's the man who brought soccer in from the wilderness, that lonely place, in a rugby-mad nation, where nobody is interested.

He's a national hero, you know. Or ought to be. I'm not sure he is, quite, although he certainly was, a long time ago, in 1982, when he was described as "universally loved"; he was the lad who scored a goal against the Chinese and helped to get New Zealand to the World Cup finals.

He had an appalling moustache then. If he hadn't got the All Whites to the World Cup, it's likely that that moustache would have been long forgotten. Now his old files and photographs are trawled through. "Yeah, a lot of people bring that up now. That moustache, the tight shorts ..." He must have been pretty cool. He looked horrified at the thought. "Umm, you know, that was the era."

He was eating his lunch very calmly and precisely. He was eating what should have been a horrible mess of ham, coleslaw, sun-dried tomatoes and fake crabmeat.

His plate was in order; the food in tidy piles. He cut every little piece of fat from the ham, and put it neatly to one side.

A bit of fat won't hurt him. He said, calmly and precisely, "I don't like it." I bet he was one of the few who never got food in his facial hair, in the era of the moustache.

He was famous then, the much-adored young soccer player. And now he's famous again. He wouldn't put it that way. What he says is that wherever he goes, people come up to him, and the team, to congratulate them, to say lovely things.

Let's not get carried away. What he actually says is: "Everywhere I go, people are extremely complimentary on the players, and quite rightly so. And they're fantastic to the public, and so they should be."

That's a nice answer. But it was the answer to a question about what his profile was and a fairly typical response. He is not the most demonstrative fellow to have ever led a national team, except when he is, and then he confounds those expectations - of which he is aware and, I think, secretly enjoys.

When the All Whites qualified for the World Cup he was so excited he swore, on television, and offered a stream of consciousness indecipherable to even sports nuts used to sports coach speak. He said: "I'm absolutely speechless!" He was and he wasn't. He said: "We're back, mate! We're there, mate. South Afri-CA!" So we got the gist.

I suggested that people might have been a bit surprised at seeing him being emotional. "I think they were." Because he is known as the "unflappable" Ricki Herbert? "Ha, ha. Yeah, I think it is ... about balance. You know, I've tried really hard to grow a team and management with their own characters, their own personalities, their own responsibilities ... And I think that's just me."

I have no idea what this means and it must have shown, because he laughed and said, "I'm not going to change. People don't often see me behind closed doors. That can be different."

You might well wonder. "I think that's like an inner sanctum of security and the heart of the team. So if I close the door, there's a much more powerful approach."

Does he mean that behind those closed doors, his swearing might not raise an eyebrow? "Yeah! I mean, swearing is one thing, in context." He didn't seem about to put it in context so, to give him a hand, I suggested that swearing might be a useful part of the repertoire of a coach.

He said: "Exactly!" I waited for him to go on, but he was cutting a tiny piece of fat from his ham. Perhaps this was an insight into his coaching methods. He said, "I think it's a good debate, because it didn't actually do anything for me as a player if somebody came in and ranted and raved and threw the toys out of the cot. It offered me nothing ... I've done it once.

"I think it had got to the point where some of the players ... coming into the camp ... hadn't been playing for two months and there were personal requirements to make sure they were ready and a whole lot of them weren't ready. And that annoyed me. That really annoyed me. And I expressed my disappointment."

I'm sure he did. He has very definite views on things. Well, one thing: soccer. He always believed the team would make it to South Africa. Although, "I wouldn't say I've had a peaceful night every night."

No, he was probably lying awake making lists in his head. The inside of his head is likely to be entirely made up of long lists. He thinks in lists. He answers in lists, which are questions to self. Try asking whether he's felt appreciated, for example. I don't think he always has, and that there is just a little residue of resentment over soccer's status, and his own.

I asked this in a variety of ways and he answered with variations on his list of questions to self. "How do you measure how you think you're rewarded? More pats on the back? Why didn't I go into some sort of corporate world? What's it worth? I don't know. Do you know?"

I do: A lot, and a Coach of the Year award, I'd say. He has devoted his life to the game. He fell in love with footie when he was 4 and first kicked the round ball.

He doesn't know why, or he doesn't know quite how to explain his grand passion. Perhaps behind closed doors he does. Perhaps he just loves it. If he was to put it that way, he may or may not insert a swear word in that sentence, depending on how emotional he was being at the time.

He might have been disappointed that he didn't win Coach of the Year at the Halberg Awards. He might even have been miffed.

"Umm. These sorts of things, you can't control." Obviously not, but was he miffed?

"I thought the team might have been a very good shot, solely on the basis that a game like that [when the All Whites beat Bahrain] kind of stops the nation." What waffle. I said he'd better win next year. He said, "Do you get a vote?"

He is capable of charm. You don't hear that too often. Calling him "unflappable" is being polite. Some people are much ruder. I read him a quote: "Herbert usually exhibits about as much lip movement as those old Thunderbird puppets, with wooden emotions to match."

He said, "yep". I waited for him to say something, anything, else. He didn't. What a clever, wooden answer.

As that response after that qualifying game demonstrated, he can be emotional. "I can be emotional, don't you worry." He said that poker-faced, too. He said he was excited. You could tell that he was, if you looked hard - his eyes were twinkling. He said, later, "I just came with my cool manner today."

I asked if he could be snippy and he said, "I can do snippy". He can and what's almost guaranteed to make him huff is the charge that he couldn't coach two teams, the national side and the Phoenix. He got the last laugh there. But does he really only get 50 grand a year for coaching the national side? "Yep".

For coaching the Phoenix he gets "more than 50 grand". The financial affairs of his boss, Terry Serepisos, have come under scrutiny lately. Are the cheques still good? "Haven't been a problem." He always has the 50 grand to fall back on anyway. "Exactly!" And he just might get a pay rise; to 55 grand. "How cool would that be!"

He says that only in the past three years has he earned "any kind of reasonable income from football". Put it to him that that's a precarious way to live and he looks genuinely startled. "But I never wanted to do anything else. I first played when I was 10, I was playing international football at 28, I started coaching at 28 and I'm still coaching at 49."

That's another of his lists. You wouldn't call it an emotional summary of his career to date.

I said: "Is this the greatest achievement of your life?" and he said, "Absolutely, yeah. Because there is a structural organisational element to this that you've had to put together". That made me shout a bit: "Don't make it sound so boring!" He appealed to the media manager: "She's really got me there!" I griped: "I'm asking about his greatest achievement and he makes it sound like a committee meeting."

He had another go. "Well, it's all the millions of things you've got to do and you've just got to absolutely dedicate your life and I have, so when you come to the end and you qualify for the World Cup you kind of feel like you've done something special ..."

I think I know why he talks in riddles. He's been living with a dream in his head for so long, a goal so incomprehensible to almost everyone else, that attempting to articulate that dream was always going to sound like nonsense, the ravings of a mad man. NZ would get to the World Cup? Sheer lunacy.

I said, "Are you an optimist"? "Yes," he said. That was my last question. It might have been my only question.

I think I can see why he's such a good coach. I really didn't care about the World Cup before I met him. But I liked him so much - God knows how he did it; by not trying, I suppose - that I wanted to give him a goodbye, good-luck hug. But one wouldn't want to come over all emotional now, would one?