New Zealand to play with ten men!

New Zealand's Rory Fallon

Tournament outsiders New Zealand are to trial a novel approach which may enhance their competitiveness at World Cup 2010. New Zealand’s Director of Football Shane Cairns contacted WCC to explain:

“Everyone knows that we’ve got our work cut out in South Africa. Some bookies have us down as 2000/1 to win and the biggest team we’ve beaten recently is Bahrain. So we’ve decided that we have to do something a little bit remarkable to give us a fighting chance against some of the best sides in the world.

“We did some research and were very interested in some findings from social psychology. Studies show that people often don’t perform at their best when working in large groups. When working in a team we seem to accept, either consciously or unconsciously, that others can pick up the slack if we take it easy. Performance does not increase proportionately when individuals are added to a group. For example, if an 11th player is added to a group of 10 this is unlikely to improve overall productivity by 10%. In fact, when addressing certain tasks, or facing particular situations, a smaller group would work more effectively. This phenomenon is known as ‘social loafing‘. Also, if things go wrong people in groups are less likely to take steps to address the problem. This is because others are in a position to help as well, so why don’t they do it? There’s also less chance of us being held accountable if blame can be dispersed. This is called ‘diffusion of responsibility’.

“Football has been demonstrating these phenomena for years, but we will be the first team to address them in a positive and systematic manner. It’s a footballing truism that it can be hard to beat a team which has been reduced to ten men. The impact of losing a player does not correlate neatly with team performance, but quite often it seems that performance is actually enhanced. What happens is that the remaining players try harder, putting in more effort to compensate for the reduction in team size. It thus appears that the optimum group number for inspiring individual effort in football is less than 11.

“So the New Zealand management team has decided that the beneficial impacts of a reduced side should not be dependent on ad hoc, unplanned occurrences such as a sending off. We want to convert this into a deliberate and structured strategy. Playing with ten men in South Africa is going to give us a key competitive edge over our rivals. In fact, if we win our first game against Slovakia we might play with nine against Italy. And if we win that then we’ll go with eight against Paraguay. If we continue with this approach we’ll be playing with four men by the final. We’re led to believe there’s a minimum number of players you can have in a team, so FIFA might not let us reduce the side that much. But we’ll jandal that particular judder bar when we get to it.”