All Whites need multi-coloured palette, not football by numbers

The Junior All Whites are too white. That time warp team didn't reflect what is or should be going on in Kiwi football. Photo / Getty Images

Here goes. This is what struck me about our under-20 football side during the World Cup, which concludes with the final at Albany on Saturday evening.

The Junior All Whites are too white. That time warp team didn't reflect what is or should be going on in Kiwi football.

This is not a comment about race per se, but a clever clogs way of saying they played in an overly familiar style from the past, and even had a lot of familiar football names. It looked like a bit of a closed shop that just about ticked enough boxes to keep jobs safe and make enough people happy.

The Auckland City world club squad of last year represented a more exciting vision. Spaniard Ramon Tribulietz and his backers produced a multi-national outfit playing possession football with some flair.

New Zealand, or at least Auckland, is a multi-cultural city and our football fields - whether hosting competitive or informal games - are packed with players of all creeds and some with amazing skills. We are a city of South Americans, Africans, new Europeans, and Asians. Yet the make-up of the national junior team, and the fairly mechanical way they played, was old world.

Bill Tuiloma is our best junior prospect apparently, but most of us only know that because we are told that. Where were players who left opponents bewildered and crowds bedazzled?

A like-minded football-crazy friend put it this way: "New Zealand needs a system which isn't so much of a system. Is New Zealand football doing everything it can to find the young players with the extreme creativity and skill, who can take players on, score from free kicks?"

He suggested staging special skills tournaments to draw in and showcase players who were being overlooked, while acknowledging it could be difficult fitting maverick players into a football team. He surmised that New Zealand football methods might be scaring off or squashing those who did not fit the traditional mould.

Another football mate reckons the game is open to the really clever players and ethnic diversity, but the budding superstars just aren't out there. "That junior side played like every other New Zealand football team plays and will always play. They struggled in the attacking third and couldn't score goals," he said. He thought the women's Football Ferns showed more creativity.

Ernie Merrick, the Scot who coaches the Phoenix, says there must be another Marcos Rojas or two out there somewhere. Rojas is the most gifted player produced out of New Zealand for many years, but it took a Phoenix supporters' club scholarship for his talents to be properly recognised. If the system failed to put a huge tick over Rojas, how many others have slipped through the net?

Maybe, by the time of the next junior world tournament, the New Zealand side will be laced with players of dazzling skill and - to this Anglo Saxon tongue - tough-to-pronounce names. Or maybe the system will carry on regardless while the super talents are scouted and developed in other ways.

The current juniors did a creditable job in the tournament, although they couldn't turn home advantage into anything memorable. Some of those players might forge bog standard careers around the world. But where were the kids who can take on the world? At the very least, it is a question worth asking.