Soccer: Players ill equipped to further careers

Bay players are ill equipped to take their skills into a professional arena.

Hawke's Bay United soccer players are ill equipped to ply their trade in the professional arena, according to Brett Angell.

"All these players, in a funny way, want to play professionally but haven't, at the moment, got the tools to do that," says the newly appointed franchise coach.

Help, guidance and experience, Angell feels, are essential prerequisites to acquiring those tools,

"Realistically, what they're doing now is moving from one pay cheque to the next for four months or six months.

"That's not professional football. That comes when you know where you're going to be for the next year, two years, three years."

If players don't want progress, then the franchise can't do much about it.

All Angell wants is a modicum of honesty to commitment from players in making themselves marketable to other clubs.

The Central Football development programme he has helped bed in "is as good as any" template nationally.

With a crop of 16 to 17-year-olds in the Central region's development ranks, Angell has a vision of paving a pathway for them to the senior squad in a few years.

The results don't bother him as much as having to grapple with preventing a pool of skills leaving a region to attend universities.

Unlike other developed nations with professional soccer clubs, New Zealand has no choice but to prepare its talent to gravitate overseas to earn a living.

The Bay United team under ex-coach Chris Greatholder last summer could have won an O-League berth but Angell says it wouldn't necessarily have been the same composition because the Oceania campaign is 12 months away.

"If people want to play O-League then I say this is the greatest country to be able to play higher level of football without playing for the same team.

"The structure of the O-League says even if you're playing for [Team] Wellington or Auckland [City] it doesn't mean you're necessarily going to play O-League for them because they can go and bring new others."

That didn't mean players couldn't do that with Bay United.

"In an ideal world it's with Hawke's Bay United but, realistically, this year it's not going to happen."

In a free market, other clubs will dangle carrots to players so it will be Bay United's decision to cut them loose or counter offers.

Alternatively, it can offer players the opportunity to hone their skills for a better future.