Football: All Whites needed more than hope

New Zealand goalkeeper Stefan Marinovic is comforted after the All Whites fail to qualify for Russia. Photo / AP

Hope is a cruel beast.

It can turn cynics into believers. It can convince you that the near impossible is just within reach if only...

So All Whites fans, the ones who made their excuses and clocked off early yesterday, would have raised a glass to their "if onlys" last night and woke this morning to cold, hard facts.

There will be no repeat of the glory of Spain '82, or South Africa '10. Shane Smeltz, Winston Reid and the Steves, Wooddin and Sumner, will remain the only New Zealanders to score at a World Cup, until 2022 at least.

It could have been different. Of course it could. If French referee Clement Turpin had not swallowed his whistle he could have easily awarded the All Whites a penalty within 20 seconds as Kosta Barbarouses was cleary held back in the box.

An early lead might have changed the complexion of the tie but then again, patterns emerge over two legs and those that did were one-sided.

The All Whites could not muster a single shot on target over 180 minutes. Even when Peru sat back on a 2-0 lead and invited the visitors to attack, even when Chris Woods' size and strength made life difficult for the defenders, the All Whites did not ask Peru keeper Pedro Gallese to do much more than kill time and take goalkicks.

That has been New Zealand's Achilles heel, its strained calf and its torn hamstring throughout coach Anthony Hudson's reign. For all the cheap talk of attractive football and despite an apparent abundance of creative talent - read Ryan Thomas, Barbarouses and Marcos Rojas - New Zealand plain can't score goals.

In the past 11 matches against non-Oceania opposition the score reads 18-4 to the other teams. That's a goal every 247 minutes. You can be gutsy, you can be committed and you can defend staunchly, but at some time or another you're going to have to stick the ball in the back of the net to win games against good teams and that's something Hudson's teams could never master.

The well-dressed Englishman will no doubt leave now for fresh Colorado pastures. He will do so neither as a failure nor as a success. It would be cruel to call him forgettable but... hang on a minute, what was I talking about?

The next coach will arrive and face the same problems: the lack of consistent availability of the best players and the vast gulf in class between the tomato-can opposition in the Oceania confederation and the rest of the footballing world.

That will take some figuring out but at least one equation is very simple.

There will be 32 teams in Russia next year and the All Whites won't be one of them.