#11 Australia (Home, 2010/2012)

21:59 a-league , american samoa , australia , australia football , australia shirt , football shirt collection 1 Comments

Ah, Australia. When I was younger, I specially liked the country for some reason. I actually had a pen-friend from there. I remember her name was Erin Pan, and she was from Caringbah, a small town near Sydney. Hope she's fine. It was quite magical receiving (and sending) letters to a girl in Australia. That piece of paper had to travel all the way to the other side of the globe, and it was pretty fascinating. She was cool, but absolutely uninformed about what was going on outside her country. Once she asked me if we had Harry Potter's books here in Portugal. I said "yeah, I actually read them". Then she asked if we had movie theatres over here. No. We don't. Portugal is like Burundi, except even poorer.

I remember she didn't know much about football. She was mostly into swimming (probably because Thorpe, an absolute legend), and I think she tried to tell me about their "football". Won't even bother try to explain it, I couldn't care less. Sometimes EuroSport (awesome channel if you ask me) broadcasts some matches of Australian Football, and to me it looks just messy.

No surprises their national football (the real one) team underachieved for quite a long time. Recently they're doing just fine: they did well in World Cup 2006 and World Cup 2010. Even New Zealand showed some good defensive skills in 2010. After decades playing against Tonga, Samoa and other minnows, Australia "moved" to the Asian Zone Qualifiers. Great news for them, as now they face serious opponents instead a bunch of amateur players with little talent. That made them improve a lot, and it's good to see them playing in the World Cup. They always had decent players, like Kewell, Emerton, Cahill, Neill or Vidmar, and they'd usually fail to qualify in the very last match against a south-american team.


I bought the shirt in Germany, on a recent 15-day-work-trip. In the last day, I had not much to do, so I walked around to visit some sports shops I had seen before. In one of those shops, there were some interesting shirts with 30% or 40% off. I decided to get the Australia one - the other option was Switzerland, I think. Total cost: 30€. Cheap, huh?

Yeah, but it could have been a huge headache. Let me explain: I paid for the shirt, and then went to the hotel to pick my stuff up. When I was about to leave, the receptionist said there were some bills still unpaid, so I went there to pay those. With my debit card. But I couldn't find it. I immediatly realised I had left the card in the sports shop. I ran all the way there, and luckily it was still there. The girl in the shop was already calling some hotels to warn some tourist left his card there - nice from them! So, happy ending: I got the shirt for a low price, got the card, and some adrenaline in my last day in Germany. Not bad.

The Socceroos. The kanguru was supposed to put some boxing gloves on and then fight.

The shirt looks good, with a classy dark-yellow (almost golden) and dark-green. Australia's flag is blue and white, so I had to use my friend google to know why they all use green and yellow in sports: those are the national colours, as proclaimed by some guy. So that's why. It's like Holland then.


As usual, Nike put some effort on this one. Some details make the shirt look a little more interesting.

Some little stars, resembling the ones on the flag.

"Never say never", written on the badge. My boobs feel inspired.

Football still isn't so popular in Australia, I think. The A-League works pretty much like the MLS, mostly with clubs with no tradition, just companies. I recently spoke to a shirt collector from there (a really nice guy by the way, a Raul Meireles fan), and he told me some negative stuff about the australian league. Apparently they created it out of nothing, ignoring clubs that already existed and were playing, and just allowing this clubs/companies to play. Well, if you can't be relegated, then it's not a real league, is it? Recently, some big names moved there to play soccer: first Dwight Yorke, then Robbie Fowler, and now some local stars, such as Brett Emerton, Jason Culina and Harry Kewell. They're actually looking to improve the general quality of the league, also bringing some interesting players from european clubs, and, of course, some brazilians. Let's see how it goes.



Ah, did you think I'd forget the historical 31-0 win against American Samoa? Here it is:


Archie Thompson scored 13 goals that day. He didn't score that many after that. I could have done better defending for Samoa! Well, but from what I've read a few months ago (in World Soccer Magazine, I think), they were using a really (REALLY) young squad because their players had some troubles with their passports or something. Also, their U21 squad couldn't be called up because they were in school. So they had to field 15-year-olds and so on. A disaster, but in a normal day they'd just lose 10-0 or something. I still think I could have played international football for them. I'll move there. They actually never won an official match: their best official result was a 0-4 loss against Samoa (their bitter rivals, I suppose). Their star is probably Rawlston Masaniai, who plays for Osnabruck II, the amateur team of VfL Osnabruck, now in 3.Bundesliga. Not bad, but Osnabruck II is probably playing in 6th division or something. Nick, from My Football Shirt Project owns an American Samoa shirt. It looks surprsingly good.