KEY POINTS:
The national honours system has a haphazard way of dipping into the past. It is far from perfect, but awards do sometimes point out who we have taken for granted.
Enter Kevin Fallon, one half of the most famous coaching partnership in New Zealand sport, and now freshly
admitted to the New Zealand Order of Merit via the New Year list.
"Why this year?" you may ask.
Why, more importantly, weren't Fallon and head coach John Adshead awarded national honours immediately after they steered the All Whites on the most exhilarating ride in our sports history - to the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain?
Such honour slip-ups are never to be reasoned with and while Fallon wonders why an earlier award passed the coaching duo by, he is clearly chuffed that his lifetime of football fanaticism, and the game itself, has won this recognition.
Spending an afternoon in the hectic company of Fallon is rollicking entertainment, although it would have been a tougher business for a reporter in the pre-recorder days of pen and Pitmans.
Fallon's reputation, as a player and coach, was a rugged - to put it nicely - and uncompromising force of nature.
His story is a whirl of events, from the tough football-dominated streets of 1950s South Yorkshire to sun-drenched days in Gisborne and Nelson, and up the highway to his Mt Albert Grammar School football academy.
Every quick serve of a question is greeted by a long, one-man rally of an answer. These are interspersed with a few animated physical demonstrations in the lounge of his Mt Albert apartment along with sharp, two-handed sweeps of voluminous hair that qualifies as jet black on a man of 59.
Like many larger-than-life figures, Fallon is, physically, not quite as big as you might imagine although you look at those limbs and imagine the damage they inflicted and threatened in their soccer heyday.
He is also a voracious reader of everything, and an enthusiastic writer of poems and short stories.
On the day of our interview, he is rereading the widely acclaimed autobiography by former Irish international Tony Cascarino.
There are soccer books aplenty on shelves and in boxes, ready for the move he and wife Mere are about to make. It's a house move that is not going well, because Fallon keeps reading instead of packing.
Works by and about great writers and poets - names such as Yeats, Joyce, Bukowski, Doyle, Beckett, Baxter and Wolfe - also stare out from among the soccer crowd. A Fallon autobiography might join them one day.
He was a boy from the village of Bramley, one of three siblings whose late father, a mechanical engineer, worked seven days a week in often forlorn conditions. Fallon's mother - she is still working as a cleaner at the age of 83 - worked five days a week, so the family were well provided for by the standards of the area.
South Yorkshire was a place of steel and coal, and people toughened by their labours. Even while Fallon was at school - he left at 15 to play soccer professionally - he did holiday work in skilled Irish gangs, laying gas pipes and tarmac.
"I'll never forget going to football matches past the factories at night. You could peek in from the double decker bus and see big burly men stripped to the waist and in aprons, working over hot anvils and big tubs."
Fallon won representative honours as a youngster and but for a disastrous trial in which he left his preferred boots on the train and had to play on ice in the wrong footwear, he should have made the England schoolboys.
Professional clubs showed an interest and Fallon ended up with Rotherham in the old second division, later played for Sligo in Ireland, before ending up in Southend. It is a story spiked with triumphs, a nightclub dispute, a sacking, a pay squabble, a flirtation with boxing, and a stint back working on roads. In short, mad adventure.
It was the Gisborne coach Alan Vest, a former Barnsley player, who remembered the tough centreback from Rotherham and lured Fallon to New Zealand in 1972.
Having decided, on a whim, to stop off in Hong Kong, he arrived in Auckland three days late and broke.
Fallon and New Zealand soccer proved a marriage made in heaven despite dollops of hell. There have been controversies almost from the outset when as a mid-20s player-coach with Gisborne, he had a training ground altercation with his centreback, Ken Dugdale, which led to two future national coaches being sacked on the same night, although Fallon returned for later stints.
There were triumphs at many levels, including a 1977 Chatham Cup victory with Nelson as a player-coach, having fought back from a knee injury that had supposedly ended his career. And he won a fairytale national league title with Gisborne in 1984, storming to the crown with a club that were cellar dwellers the previous year.
But nothing will ever match the Adshead-Fallon journey to Spain in 1982.
On the urging of Auckland journalist Alan Sefton, Charlie Dempsey, the New Zealand soccer supremo, had phoned Fallon in late 1980, inviting him to Auckland, adding he should wear a suit.
"I said to Mere, 'I've got to fly to Auckland - I think they want me to play for the national team. I'm a bit old, a bit past it, but I can do a job for them'.
"Well, they sat me down at Newmarket Park and John said, 'how do you think you'll go, coaching this side?' My chin just dropped."
Lancashire met Yorkshire on the other side of the world, and it clicked. Adshead's All Whites had been shaky to that point. Fallon immediately stamped his mark, suggesting there were "snivellers" in the midst and declaring that only players of stout hearts need apply.
"I was quoted as saying you must be prepared to live in a tent on a hillside if you want to play for your country," he recalls.
Shortly after they were thrown together, the All Whites stunned the soccer world with a 4-0 win over Mexico in Auckland, the widely accepted birthplace of the 1982 glories.
Adshead and Fallon were very different characters.
They had clearly defined roles: Adshead was the grand planner, the overlord, with some coaching duties; Fallon was down in the trenches, training the troops. Selections were shared, and rarely caused argument. In the main, it was a settled side of little controversy - finals goalkeeping dramas aside.
Adshead, whose past included nightclub comedy work, was a masterful, free-flowing communicator who, as Fallon puts it, "probably never read a book in his life". Fallon was the hard-headed coach who devoured books but spared his players the task of having to read between the lines.
An iconic moment in this relationship occurred in Kuwait late in the long qualifying road to Spain when the All Whites suffered a potentially disastrous draw. Fallon immediately blamed goalkeeper Richard Wilson for errors and harangued him, from dressing room to dining hall. Adshead was the conciliator.
As for the finals tournament itself, Fallon recalls it with unabated delight, as much for the surrounding delights as the soccer itself.
Chief among his memories is that of a Brazilian fan who would land a kite near Frank van Hattum then jag it airborne whenever the referee or the All Whites goalkeeper attempted to get near it. He talks with greatest pride about pushing the finest of all Scottish sides - Jock Stein, Kenny Dalglish and all - to the limit in a 5-2 defeat.
On returning to New Zealand, Fallon and his five Gisborne World Cup players had to negotiate five national league games in one week. It was back to earth, but unlike the players, Fallon revelled in it.
"I was so desperate to win the league but I was the only one up for it, in all honesty," he says.
"To me it was another day at the office. I've never differentiated between Mt Albert Grammar or the All Whites. I mean that. I want that schoolboy team to play the best bloody football this country has ever seen."
His jobs, since 1982, have included coaching the national under-17s at the 1999 world tournament in Auckland, where they beat highly-rated Poland.
Controversy struck, again, when Fallon demanded the youngsters hand over their cellphones the night before the match. Subsequent parental unrest led to his prompt sacking, he believes.
That was just another stop on an eventful journey which has included a stint with the disastrous Kingz. But at no point could you ever say an opportunity has been lost. He even ended up as an unqualified physical education teacher at Mt Albert Grammar prior to launching the academy.
For four years, he zapped between town and city on a jet owned by Gisborne City, coaching the club and running the Mt Albert academy.
Fallon and Mere, of East Coast Ngati Porou origins, have raised three children, Bianca, Sean and Rory. The two boys reached heights as footballers.
Fallon's work with younger players has dominated his past decade.
His success with blue collar Mt Albert Grammar has been remarkable, securing national and local titles galore and producing top prospects. This has been achieved during a fierce rivalry with their major rivals, the blue-blood Auckland Grammar.
He has mellowed, but only perhaps.
"Some people hate me - there's a 50/50 feedback from people who've worked for me," he says. "I've polarised opinion. I'm way too much for some people, but I think I'm a character. There's a lot of humour when you get to know me."
This, from a man whose homelife is spent buried in books with the soundtrack provided by singer/poets - Tom Waits, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. What you see is what you get with Kevin Fallon, but there are surprises in the detail.
And he is still a man having fun. He will also get to look over "the Mt Albert mountain and my football ground".
Yes, the house move will take him closer still to his footballing heart.
Fallon says: "I trained a side and John Adshead managed it to compete against the top class of the world. I go all around this country and people go 'you're the soccer man'.
"But I'm a work in progress. I'm looking at a book but there will be more chapters. It's not over yet, no chance. I saw myself on TV and you can see the age in the face, in the eyes and the wrinkles. But you can't guess the age inside."
It's time for Adshead to be honoured too
The awarding of a New Year's gong to Kevin Fallon has raised a remarkable anomaly in our sport.
John Adshead, the manager/coach of the 1982 All Whites, has never received any recognition under our honours system. It's time, even all these years later, for this to be put right.
What Adshead and Fallon achieved before and during the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain will always rank at the top of New Zealand sport.
I doubt whether any campaign has captured the romanticism of sport quite like that magical run of qualifying and finals games.
The Steve Sumner-captained side played with great honour against powerful, fully professional Scottish, Soviet Union and Brazilian sides in Spain.
Awards are an inexact science, but some things are obvious.
When I rang Adshead at his Mt Maunganui home this week, he played the matter down and pointed to the years of coaching work that Fallon has done at all levels in this country whereas he, Adshead, had spent time overseas.
The public doesn't see Kevin Fallon at work at 6 o'clock every morning, said Adshead, with the utmost loyalty to his old comrade, before adding that football often struggled for recognition here.
Adshead and Fallon should have been honoured at the time. It was an extraordinary feat, forming a side capable of forcing its way past Australia and China among others, before coping admirably in the toughest sports competition on the planet.
And as a matter of interest, administrator Charlie Dempsey, the soccer supremo who played a major hand in those golden days, was made a CBE in 1983.
