The New Zealand U-23 men leave for Samoa this morning to compete in the Pacific Games. We caught up with head coach Des Buckingham on his preparation and how the team will take on the challenge of meeting the best senior men’s teams from the Oceania Football Confederation.

You have held a training camp this week in Auckland, how have your preparations been for the Pacific Games?

Preparation has been good. We have only had the team on the field for three days but we have been able to build on a lot of things that we had set up during the U-20s campaign. It has been great for me to continue working through. We spent 15 months building relationships with the players. We talk about the cultural piece as well as our on-field performances, now taking this U-23 team it has given us the chance to continue working on that without having to start again.

It has been a quick turnaround for this squad with some logistical issues, how have you overcome those challenges?

You can look at them as challenges or you could look at them as opportunities. This group of young men have the chance to put themselves in the frame for selection for later in the year. In the short-term our focus is on the Pacific Games and the group we are taking there but the longer-term picture is the OFC U-23 Championship in September. We will have two really important things in place by then. One will be the September window. There is a good likelihood that we will have a couple of fixtures in there and that will give us the chance to showcase our talent at U-23 level. We will look to do that and continue the way we played with the 20s at the World Cup. So that will be exciting for us to be involved in and then the most important thing for us will be the Olympic qualifiers and making sure we have got a plan in place that is communicated to the clubs and the players, because it falls outside of a FIFA window.

This U-23 campaign starts now and these players have got a huge opportunity to go to the Olympics, how do you feel about that? 

They do and that is really exciting. We had a big list of players which these 20 have been selected from, which is the same as what we did for the U-20s. We started with 70 players and I have kept in contact with all of them the whole way through, whether they have been in camps or squads or the World Cup itself, and it is the same process with the 23s. There is a wider list of players which incorporates those 20s and also the 1997-98 born players who become eligible for this 23s group. We start the process now of who are going to be the best players to help us qualify for the Olympic Games.

You are going to face some tough conditions in Samoa and some challenging opposition as well, with an U-23 side taking on senior men’s teams. How much of a challenge is this going to be? 

The Pacific Games is a major tournament for the Pacific Islands and to play in any major tournament is a huge privilege. But this will be a huge challenge. Some of the teams have prepared for weeks and months for this tournament and they are going with a full-strength senior national team. We are taking an U-23 team but, when you average out the age, it is an U-21 group really. But we are focused on us and won’t be too focused on the opposition. We will prepare as best we can to be ready.

There are some exciting opportunities for the U-23s and the All Whites coming up, how are you looking forward to being part of that? 

Yeah, it is going to be an exciting six months. We have got the Pacific Games, we have the September window, there are the Olympic qualifiers and in November there is the All Whites window in Ireland. We have gone from limited activity over the past year and now we will have lots of games and lots of opportunities to showcase some very good young Kiwis into the under-23s or integrate them into what is already a very good All Whites team.

Article added: Thursday 04 July 2019