English coach Anthony Hudson is currently preparing New Zealand for the upcoming Confederations Cup in Russia.
The England national team will not be a representative at the upcoming Confederations Cup in 2017, but they will at least have a representative in the form of Hudson. The national team coach is determined to take New Zealand back to lofty heights once again. Under the regime of the previous manager, the national team managed to do that and thinkable by qualifying for the World Cup 2010 in South Africa. Since then, however, the team has not been performing well.
The retirement of several high profile players has also contributed to New Zealand’s demise. Hudson has the task of rebuilding the team once again. It is easier said than done since there is an extremely small pool of players to choose from. Furthermore, even these small number of players are largely playing their football in different parts of the world. It makes it extremely difficult to bring them together as a unit. Confederations Cup preparations, though, are expected to help in this regard and Hudson himself accepted this aspect. Even though New Zealand’s Olympic team was disqualified, the team did extremely well under the management of Hudson.
“I’m enjoying it in New Zealand. I’ve been here two years and it’s been tough in a way because we haven’t played a lot of games and it’s difficult to get people together. But we’ve got this tournament to look forward to now and that’s massive. It’s all opening up now. It’s [Olympic disqualification] because of things like this that we’ve got such a good bond. It’s given the youngsters a lot of character and brought the whole team together, so it’s all been worthwhile. It’s all part of the story,” said Hudson about his time in New Zealand and about disqualification from the Olympics.