They have been forced to work hard for their previous three victories, including battling back from 2-0 down to beat New Caledonia on Monday. Today they face hosts Fiji with the knowledge that a win will see them successfully defend their regional title and thus qualify for the FIFA U-20 World Cup Turkey 2013.
oceaniafootball.com spoke to New Zealand coach Chris Milicich for his view on how his side is shaping up ahead of their final match of the tournament.
Some are calling today’s match the final of this tournament, are you ready for this Fiji side?
The feeling would be that we’ve got to be ready, so we will be ready.
How are you approaching this match?
We’ll approach it as best we can, obviously our big thing in the last 24 hours has been recovery of the players, to get them out to play their fourth game in seven days, which is a pretty tough ask. Obviously we’ve done a lot of analysis on Fiji and how they play and what they do, the types of players that they’ve got, and they’ll have done the same to us. So my feeling is it could be quite a stalemate.
When you’ve watched Fiji have they looked like an unbeatable side to you?
Well, they continue to win games. They find ways to win games, which is always a good sign for a team. They’re obviously very well organised, they’ve got their plan of what they want to do and they’re sticking to it which is good to see. They’ve obviously decided the way they’re going to play and how they’re going to dominate a side. They have run a side down from 2-0 like we have, they have also won quite comfortably from in front so you know, they’ve played two games and both games they’ve looked pretty good.
How are your players shaping up? They have had a challenging tournament including a lot of games in a short period of time and the weather conditions probably aren’t ideal for a lot of them, are they going to make it through another tough game?
They have to. There are no ifs or buts about it. They have to manage it through, they have to do their job. That’s what some of them do for a living so they’ll play as they’ve always done.
You have been rotating your players, are you happy with how that’s working?
I think we’ve had to rotate, we haven’t had the luxury of playing two games and then having a three-day rest. And if we didn’t rotate, we’d have no players available from our top line-up for this match. So rotation has been a policy, well, it’s not even rotation it’s just basically ensuring that the players will all continue to be able to play. In fact, it’s nothing to do with rotation it’s just the best players that are available for the day play and one of the beauties of the New Zealand set-up now is that the squads are getting quite deep when it comes to playing talent. As we’ve seen, most of the players have played games but the levels have not dropped very much.

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