Dylan Cleaver's column last week querying New Zealand's international credentials prompted NZ Football CEO Graham Seatter to reply.
KEY POINTS:
New Zealand Football is determined to take advantage of the great opportunity provided by Australia's move to the Asian Confederation.
We are now the top nation in the Oceania Football Confederation and have a relatively easy pathway to qualify for all under-age and women's World Cups, plus theConfederations Cup and the Olympic Games.
But we also have a great challenge of how to reach a credible standard in the world's biggest game when the pathway to World Cups is through football's weakest confederation.
Australia was successful in this regard and that was achieved through a very strong domestic programme coupled with frequent international competition at a high level.
Before 2006, we had been poor in both areas, in particular our international competition which had been largely non-existent.
Consequently, when presented with the opportunity to qualify more easily through Oceania for World Cups, we needed to take drastic action to become competitive at the high level of these competitions.
We significantly increased the quantity and quality of our international programmes at all levels, from six international games in 2005 to 68 such matches in 2006. This year the number is likely to exceed 80.
In football, the key aspect of performing at the highest level is experience. If you do not experience the skill and pace of the game at that level, you will never learn to cope.
We have sought and embraced these opportunities without accepting a fear-of-failure mentality. We are prepared to play against the best teams in the world. That approach was evident when the All Whites played Brazil in Geneva last year.
Yes, there are risks and people may take a negative view of a scoreline when you lose but if you don't lose, you won't learn. We have so much to learn that it may take a lot of losses to make real progress.
We acknowledge that playing games against top teams is not the simple answer to success. There are many other elements that must be addressed and we are making progress in those areas but international results will always be highly visible and easily analysed.
In this very early stage building our international competitiveness, we recognise that our results have been poor, predictably.
