Chandler, who is also involved with the 11-a-side game as head coach of NZFC franchise Hawkes Bay United, has only been with the New Zealand side for a short time but is confident of earning success at the tournament. He sat down with oceaniafootball.com to talk about his hopes for the Kiwi team.
How are the preparations for the OFC Futsal Championship going?
We’ve come together really well. We’re still learning about each other because we’re a new group but I’m positive about how it’s looking. We can defend well and have a very good camaraderie. We know there’s a lot of flair out there and that we’ll be up against some really good teams. But we’ve got an inner belief and I think we’ll go there and perform well.
What will your goals be in Fiji?
I think, realistically, we’d love to get to the final and be in the top two. But anything is possible. I think we’ll be hard to break down and we know we can score. We need an improvement on how the team has done in the past.
What is your background in futsal?
I’d been involved with it a little bit in the UK before I came to New Zealand six years ago. So I knew about it from that and, when I came here, I was the director of football for the Waikato-Bay of Plenty federation and I met a couple of guys who were involved with futsal. I just really re-acquainted myself with the game and saw how fantastic it was. Originally, I saw it as a development tool for younger players – you can always tell which kids have played futsal. But now, in the last four years, I’ve really seen it as a sport in its own right and I’ve got incredibly interested in it and the way it can offer kids pathways. There are professional leagues around the world, it’s huge. I think all the members of the Spanish team who’ve just won the World Cup played futsal. It’s a great sport and I really want to get more into it. It also enables me to work internationally and still coach in the NZFC as head coach of Hawkes Bay United.
Do you encourage your players at Hawkes Bay to play futsal?
We’ve got one player from Hawkes Bay in the squad, Brayden Lissington. For the national league team, it is part of our pre-season training. I run the academy at Hawkes Bay as well and it’s a component of our training for that. I’m a big believer in what this game does and the transition it has with the grass game but more and more I am seeing futsal as its own sport. While the two codes need to work together, we also need to keep them separate to some degree.
Which players in the Futsal Whites squad should fans look out for at the OFC championship?
Micky Malivuk is a very good football player, the captain Marvin Eakins has been before, and I’ve got two exceptional goalkeepers in Elias Billeh and Clayton Chappell, who are making my life difficult because I can’t separate them. They have such good attributes and they both bring different things. Miro Major is a very good futsal player and we’ve got some great new additions with the younger players like Said Soleimanpour and Lucas Silva. There’s a blend of different attributes which seem to come together very well.
Which teams do you think you’ll have to watch out for?
The Solomon Islands, Fiji and Vanuatu. I don’t think there’s any surprises in knowing who’s who and what’s what. The Solomons is our first game but I’m quite happy with that, it will be a measure of where we are. I coached two Solomon Islands boys in the NZFC and I know what they’re like, they’re incredible futsal players. I just hope that we have a difference within our defensive structure. I’ll make sure we are more organised than any other team and I’m hoping that within that organisation we can then build a platform to go forward and score goals.
Are you pleased with how the build-up has gone?
My appointment was late, I didn’t join until after the trials. We had a camp three weeks ago which was intense and very professional in the way the lads approached it. A lot of them haven’t been in an international environment before but they’ve adjusted incredibly well and have kept up the levels I instilled then. So the preparations have gone incredibly well in a short space of time. I just wonder what we could have done if we’d had more time and I hope we will get more time in the future. I don’t want this to be a one-off campaign. Our ultimate goal is to go to a World Cup and to do that we have to win these Oceania competitions.