Source: Radio New Zealand
Captain Kate Taylor takes a selfie with her Football Ferns team celebrating the 5-0 win over Fiji. Andrew Cornaga/www.photosport.nz
Half the job is done and now Football Ferns coach Michael Mayne will have some tough decisions to make about who will finish it off.
New Zealand defeated Fiji 5-0 on Saturday in the semi-finals of the Oceania Qualifiers for next year’s Football World Cup.
A win over Papua New Guinea in the final in Auckland on Wednesday will book their ticket to Brazil and a seventh World Cup appearance.
As co-hosts of the last World Cup in 2023 the Football Ferns did not go through the qualification process and captain Kate Taylor has called the campaign towards the 2027 event a “completely different journey”.
“To be able to potentially qualify at home in front of our friends and our whanau, I think that’s something that we all want.”
The defender, who plays club football in France, scored her third goal for the Football Ferns against Fiji in Hamilton and was feeling a bit of extra pressure being back on home soil.
“I just wanted to play hard and lead the team well, kind of play pressure-free, but that’s a little bit hard sometimes, especially at home and in front of my parents that have come up, but it was special.”
Across the four games the Football Ferns have played during the qualification process they have scored 24 goals from 14 different goal scorers.
Against Fiji they believed they could have scored more.
With only one game left in the qualification process and so much on the line, Taylor said not much would change in their approach that had got the side this far but the intensity in camp would lift.
“Every single player wants to be on that field and contributing and scoring goals and putting in big challenges and tackles, and so I think the energy will go up and our competitiveness and training will go up as well.”
The semi-finals were played a day earlier than scheduled due to the threat of Cyclone Vaianu which gives the Football Ferns and Papua New Guinea an extra day ahead of the final which Mayne would be taking advantage of.
“We’ve got a little bit more time than we planned so we’ll look at how the players bounce back from [the semi-final], and then every single player in that group wants to be in that final to put us through, so I expect there’s going to be a lot of competition for those places come Wednesday night,” Mayne said.
“The extra session will help. It will give us a little bit more time to look at the detail and where we can take some steps forward.”
Papua New Guinea booked their place in the final with a 1-0 win over American Samoa.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
