The 10 sides have been preparing as Cyclone Gabrielle has caused a national state of emergency
They’re probably tucking Brosnan and Barrett in to bed every night, singing them lullabies.
The Papua New Guinea coach was eager to put it all in perspective. Yes, the preparations of the 10 competing teams were disrupted, training impossible during the catastrophe, but that mattered little next to what the locals had endured.‘He’ in this instance is Spencer Prior, a man who has taken one of football’s quirkier journeys.
“These experiences have given me huge, huge empathy for female footballers and the circumstances they face,” he said in an interview with Fifa. “There’s no doubt that in many countries they’re still second-class citizens when it comes to things like facilities and access to fields and good coaching. When and how that will change, I really don’t know.”
But the bulk of the teams currently in New Zealand and dreaming of World Cup qualification, most of them having as much chance as ourselves of winning the lottery, are so many tiers below that level you can’t but wonder how Fifa manage to avoid investing even a speck of their untold wealth – $7.5 billion alone from commercial deals relating to Qatar 2022 – in nudging the game along in those territories.
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