New Zealand has a strange relationship with football. Our undying love affair with the oval ball means that it rarely does better than a solid third in the winter code rankings, and for long stretches our national team performs its duties away from the limelight in front of the true believers. But in the depths of this winter the round ball is undeniably in the ascendant, and in large part that's down to the belief and smarts of one man.

Ricky Herbert was just 21 when New Zealand last made the FIFA World Cup Finals in 1982, but his tender years didn't prevent him being part of the dream run to Spain. Now, nearly thirty years on, he finds himself in the unique position of being a core part of the national team's second appearance at the world's biggest sporting event.

Barkers is the Official Formal Wear Supplier to the 2010 All Whites, and we managed to sit down with the All Whites coach for twenty minutes prior to the team's departure last weekend, a few hours before they headed out on a whirlwind tour which has seen the perform creditably against in a last minute loss to Australia (a game which even Australian commentators said we were unlucky to lose) and snatch an incredible 1-0 victory over Serbia, a side ranked 15th in the world.

While Herbert drank herbal tea sweetened with honey we plied him with questions about his coaching philosophies, the road to the Finals, the rise of the Phoenix and his time with the great Mt Wellington football teams of the '70s and '80s.

BARKERS: I thought I might start talking you about that era when you started in New Zealand football. I gather that you would 10,000 people along to National League games then.
RICKY HERBERT: It was a while ago, wasn’t it? I think I started national league in ’78. Back then you didn’t have the separation of clubs and grounds. Newmarket Park was instrumental, as a kid. The crowds were really big. You might get Blockhouse Bay playing Mt. Wellington, Eastern Suburbs playing North Shore. Double header, big crowd. I think there’s always the attraction to a ground like that.

BARKERS: What was the atmosphere like? It feels like New Zealand football’s under-acknowledged peak in terms of it’s public audience.
RICKY HERBERT: It’s had movement. The one thing currently that the games have been crying out for is professional football. We got 32,000 down at Westpac, as you know, not long ago. From a public point of view, of support and what’s out there, I think we’ve all seen what’s possible. I think it’s always been there. We saw it back then and it stagnated a little bit for a while. You go through trends, like you say, but we’re back there now.

BARKERS: In terms of the ’82 World Cup, did you see the way that impacted on the sport within New Zealand in profound way?
RICKY HERBERT: With that team, because the players were domestically there, or 95% of them were based in New Zealand, a lot of the preparation prior to going to the World Cup was done internally. We were pretty much up and down the breadth and width of the country, so you can kind of feel that support. Now I think it’s even bigger, to be fair. I think the sport’s even bigger now.

BARKERS: Was it difficult for you as a coach, because you would have been part of that side, as you say with 95% of the team based in New Zealand, whereas you’re having to tie together these very different guys who often hadn’t even met each other. What challenges did that present to you?
RICKY HERBERT: I think the logistics are always going to be a problem. I think that’s going to get worse because hopefully we’ll get more players overseas. I think that’s just building around a culture that we’ve got that’s incredibly strong at the moment. If players come into that and adapt and understand that reasonably quickly… I think that’s been an amazing strength for us. We’ve got guys in Denmark. We’ve got guys in Christchurch. It’s quite diverse, but it’s been really good. The hardest thing is just getting players back to the game, because again, maybe 60% to 70% of the squad now is overseas based.

BARKERS: Do you find that your experience is helpful to you and the players in terms of getting in the moment?
RICKY HERBERT:I think we can share all those memories. I think they’re fairly important. I was only 21. The average age of this group is 27. But we have got some young ones and they appreciate that, but we’ve also got some extremely seasoned professional players playing in high quality leagues around the world. The step for them is probably a realisation point of view – it may be a lot more physical than what it might have been.

BARKERS: You debuted against Mexico when you were very young, and you were coming into a campaign which was really building support. Was it difficult for you to walk into the squad and that group of players? What kind of environment did you find?
RICKY HERBERT: It wasn’t difficult. It was challenging because of your age and the expectation, and the expectation of being in a World Cup team is obviously right up there at that age, but a lot of the players in that were my teammates or the players that I was playing with on a weekly basis, so you’re kind of familiar with everybody. It’s just at the end of the day you had to prove that you were good enough to be there.

BARKERS: It was such a long, circuitous road to get to the '82 World Cup. Was it always something you felt was possible within the group, or was it something that dawned on you as you crossed various hurdles along the way?
RICKY HERBERT: Yeah, I think probably the latter. As the programme progressed, that grows your strength and your confidence. I think it was like any national team back then in that you were more hopeful than anything.

BARKERS: Did you at any point in your playing career experience that kind of unity again? Because you must have been very tight, knowing that you had such a challenge in front of you.
RICKY HERBERT: Mt. Wellington as a club side, absolutely. That had a lot of strong synergies. Guys at various ages got on extremely well. You could compare that.

BARKERS: Do you see that the New Zealand club scene at the moment – does that still exist for those sides or is that something you think could be re-engendered within New Zealand football?
RICKY HERBERT: It’s hard to know. I’m not actively involved around the NZFC. What I can say from a Phoenix point of view is that it’s incredibly strong. The Phoenix and the All Whites aren’t too dissimilar.

BARKERS: After your time in NZ, you had a stint with Wolverhampton  in the ‘80s, which had a reputation of a violent, tribal era in UK football. Was that something that you witnessed firsthand, or were you separated from that as a player?
RICKY HERBERT: I think you probably are separated from it, but coming from New Zealand too, you’re not culturally aware of it either. We had a great time. I was married then and we had a wonderful time. It was a tricky time for the club financially. We lost a whole lot of games, but I really enjoyed that. It was a really special time.

BARKERS: I guess it’s every young kid’s dream to go and play in the UK.
RICKY HERBERT: That’s what it was all about. It was an opportunity. I took it, got it, have been extremely appreciative of getting it. It wasn’t a fearful place to go. We loved it.

BARKERS: Not long after that, it seems like you got into coaching at a very young age. Were you always thinking along those lines?
RICKY HERBERT: I was 28 was when I finished international football.

BARKERS: It’s only a year older than the average age in your squad now.
RICKY HERBERT: Yeah. It’s kind of what I wanted to do. At 28, I’d had ten years in the national team, a lot of travel, a lot of demands. Nowadays, it would be very premature to retire at that age, but I did. I got straight back into it, and away we went, and I’ve been there for the last 21 years.

BARKERS: Have you always known since you started coaching that it’s what you wanted to devote your life to?
RICKY HERBERT: It’s been my life now. Playing football, coaching football. I’m not sure what I’d do if I wasn’t in it.

BARKERS: You’ve kind of been handed two goes with both Phoenix and the national side, where you came in – you were with the Phoenix before they were the Phoenix – a situation that hadn’t been going well. When you came in they were more-or-less broken, the situation you arrived with the Knights at that stage. How do you begin to resurrect, build something of substance out of something that had no history of working?
RICKY HERBERT: I’ve always been one to… culturally you’ve got to make things work. If there isn’t anything around it that people can link onto and feel part of and want to develop and make better, then what are you actually going to do? There was a process of putting building blocks in place to make sure that can happen. Like I say, we’ve got an excellent structure at the Phoenix, we’ve got an extremely good group at the All Whites. It’s just refocussing everybody back onto what’s really important because people talk about desire and passion and – shit, if you haven’t got that, why would you ever want to be a professional player or represent your country? It was easy to get rid of people or make decisions or whatever on people who didn’t bring that to the table. The rest of it is around the football culture.

BARKERS: It’s funny because in New Zealand, the dominant code is rugby. It's essentially communist, the NZRU run everything, whereas in football, the Phoenix probably in a lot of ways is bigger than that national body. There’s a sort of idea around  that that’s maybe a bad thing, but you just have to look at the results and the culture that they’ve build to show that the private enterprise, they’re not necessarily bad when it comes to sports.
RICKY HERBERT: You’ve got to look at that as an entity and go it’s probably the best thing that’s happened for New Zealand football in a long time. Obviously now, qualifying for the World Cup is another one, but having a strong professional pathway that’s been encouraged to New Zealand a part of, and it’s brought along a whole lot of fans and a football culture base. We were getting double the size of other domestic sporting events. Something’s right about it.

BARKERS: What do you put that down to? This is an era when TVs are amazing. Your seat in the lounge gives you a better view than almost anywhere in the park, short of your one. How do you as a club, from scratch fill a 30,000 seat stadium?
RICKY HERBERT: Brand. That’s one of the biggest. That wasn’t a players thing, but the signing of the players helps support that. I think like anything, that brand of football, I wanted to change it really quickly. The long ball, English style had been in New Zealand too long, so we tried to bring in players that wouldn't do that. The public got excited about it, scoring goals. It’s that general excitement that goes with a football match, not solely centred around the purist, but just fans that might want to go along and be excited by football. That’s what we have in Wellington. Westpac is a venue that it doesn’t matter age, sex, or whatever, people want to be there. It doesn’t matter whether you sit in the yellow fever zone, or you sit in the corner. At some stage, you’re involved in the game. I think that really transcended into the November 14 for the World Cup where everybody bought into that idea, and it was like ‘We’re going to Wellington. It’s a cool place to be’ and it all happened.

BARKERS: There was a period you talked about in which there was some public debate about whether there was an issue for you to be able to coach for the Phoenix and the national side, whether there was a conflict of interest. How did you approach it, and why have you been able to straddle tasks which have proved problematic for other people in the past.
RICKY HERBERT: A, I didn’t listen to criticism, and B, I was really focused on – professional football was shot, it was gone, something had to happen and change, that was a role within itself. When I got appointed to the national team job, I wasn’t coaching a professional football club, so that one kind of just evolved because of the collapse of what happened up here. I’ve always kept them completely separate, decisions are made completely separate. I’ve picked players in both environments solely on the right reasons at the right time for the games. From my point of view, consciously I’ve just managed it. I’m heavily involved in football. It’s just dug me a little bit deeper in football.

BARKERS: Has it ever caused you problems, say there’s a New Zealand player who might be on the cusp of selection who doesn’t make it there and then you have to go back and coach with the Phoenix?
RICKY HERBERT: I don’t fear that. If they’re good enough, I’ll pick them, if they’re not, I don’t. The same has happened at the club. Some of the national players are struggling to get back in the club team. That’s life. I think if you’re very honest, if you’re honest right across the board, I pick all the other players, it doesn’t have to be the national players. A lot of the Australians are overseas players on the same criteria. For me, personally, what was I going to do with the national team, how could I coach them three times a year and become a better coach? It was a ridiculous comparison. Where people wanted to make it more difficult was where the qualifiers were coming, and if there was going to be a clash of a qualifier and a Phoenix game. To me, I didn’t care what people were saying, I just found it quite disrespectful. New Zealand football and the owner of the Phoenix were extremely comfortable that it was happening – they were the only to that mattered to me.

BARKERS: This situation that you found yourself in, it’s very tough to see it being repeated in some ways. Do you feel more responsibility to ensure that you capitalise on this. You’ll go to the World Cup and play the game, but that after that, the momentum of heat that’s around the sport, that it’s maintained and that it doesn’t dissipate?
RICKY HERBERT: Yeah. Well you’ve seen some pretty cool things lately, the announcement of the foundation, $4m into grassroots initiatives. That’s really good because that’s got a lot of sustainability, but that’s not actually going to make us qualify for 2014. You’ve got real post World Cup decisions. What’s the preparation? What’s the programme to get the national team back to Brazil, to inject more money into grassroots? That $4m will keep churning and it could produce players 2018, that bracket. Post this World Cup I think it's incredibly important to keep the momentum for the national side. The team needs to play. There’s no way you can deny that.