Stop getting our footballs in a tangle

BY ERIC YOUNG

OPINION: I have never met a wave of popularity I couldn't ride, or a bandwagon I couldn't join, so I'd like to thank the All Whites for making this one so easy.

First, let me say that when you guys are in South Africa next year, no one will be shouting louder than me. I really wish you'd get around to wearing black a bit more, but let's save that argument for another time.

No one who watched or was there at the Cake Tin for your win over Bahrain will forget it. The Fallon goal. The Paston save. Both of them, works of pure genius.

But just for the moment, this is one caravan I really might need to unhitch myself from, because some of your fans are painting your success as something it just simply was not.

What it was, was a single, joyous moment in our sports history. Something so luscious you smile every time you replay it in your head.

What it was not, was beginning of the end for rugby.

How can I put this? That. Ain't. Gonna. Happen.

Some of you seem convinced that the noise we all heard at Westpac Stadium last weekend was that of our national sport taking its final breath, as if a solitary win over a team we wouldn't otherwise care about was somehow sucking all the oxygen from the room.

Are you mad? Nothing substantial will change. In a few years we may look back and say; "yep, 2009 was the turning point. We're no longer 89th in the world."

Football may become slightly more attractive to a certain number of children and parents, but rugby will always be our No1 sport.

Why? Because, as James Earl Jones said so eloquently said of baseball in Field of Dreams, it has "marked the time". Football can occasionally give us goosebumps, but rugby is in our DNA.

AT BEST, football in this country will continue to be the likeable but slightly dense child, who has good social skills and who does well in the occasional internal assessment, but who is completely out of his depth when it comes to public exams.

I can even point to history. Nearly 28 years ago, the last time the All Whites were in this situation, rugby had never been in worse shape. What we then called soccer would never get a better opportunity.

Many New Zealanders no longer had the stomach for rugby which, over the winter months of 1981, became the backdrop, and at times the excuse, for an obscene sporting civil war.

Throughout those same months, Steve Sumner's team was introducing football to an audience which might never before have given it as much as a moment's thought.

Their schedule was ridiculous. They played 15 games – six of them in May alone – just to make it to Spain. We saw them more often than they saw their families, which is why we should always consider Rory Fallon's birth in March 1982 a medical miracle. I have no idea where his father Kevin (the assistant coach in 1982) found the energy, let alone a gap in the itinerary.

There might have been a few too many funny accents in our team for some, but damn it they were winning and it's amazing how success almost never gets lost in translation.

Somehow they made it to Spain where, on sport's grandest stage they were bit players. Oh, the exposure would lead some of them to European clubs, but back here? Back here nothing changed. The great rebirth never made it to the maternity suite.

Some paint that as an opportunity lost, but really, football's stagnation and rugby's rise through the mid to late 1980s was simply New Zealand sport reasserting its natural balance.

With that lesson in mind and even with Fifa's millions to spend, New Zealand Football will still find it impossible to dent rugby's dominance and here's why.

Rugby is no longer the game it was in 1982. It is now a valid and, for many, lucrative career path. Could you honestly say that about football? Really? Because for every Ryan Nelsen, there are tens of thousands who will never make a cent kicking a ball.

Say what you like about the repetitiveness of the Tri Nations, at least the Wallabies and the Springboks are traditional and valid opponents. I have no idea what to make of the Bahrainis, whose names I have already forgotten.

We thank them for their role in getting us to the World Cup but would you care if you never saw Jaycee John again? Hussain Ali Baba?

Here's the real problem though. In the past two years, a period in which the All Whites also played at the Confederations Cup, apart from Bahrain, who were the teams they saw the most? Fiji. Vanuatu. New Caledonia.

On some level, a lot of us care about football. Of course we do.

You can follow the Phoenix or the Premier League or wherever it is that David Beckham plays now.

But it isn't the Phoenix who are responsible for this "renaissance", it is the All Whites. It is, by extension, the international game and all it offers.

If that's true, and if the game here really is to grow, then it needs to offer something a whole lot more meaningful than friendlies in Jordan, thrashings in Fiji and emptiness in Vanuatu.

- © Fairfax NZ News