East Timor Away Shirt. Yeah, East Timor! I'm really excited about this one: I read on Caveman Ninja's blog there were some for sale on eBay, but when I checked the site, it said they were sold out. But a closer look at the seller's page made me find out there was a last one. Will post it as soon as it arrives!
First of all, I must say I'm not really sure when Hong Kong used this shirt. I suppose it's from 2006/2008, but it can also be 2008/2010 or something. That's not very important, though.
People might think this is a really rare shirt, impossible to find in Europe and so on, but that's not necessarily true. It's obvious a rare shirt, but it was quite easy to find some for sale on eBay for actually quite low prices. I spent around 18€ on this one, I believe, a real bargain for an interesting and collectable item.The long-sleeves are definitly a plus: I always liked long-sleeved football shirts. Don't own many, though.
The shirt itself is no big deal at all: the usual Adidas template with 3 stripes on the sleeves, and, as you can see, 98% plain white. Their FA badge looks really interesting though:
It looks more like a karate association badge rather than a FA one, but that only makes it fancier. And look how they call themselves The Hong Konf FA LTD. Yeah, LTD. Sounds more like a company or something. Crazy guys.
I wore the shirt this week, and it feels pretty comfortable. I scored 4 goals, even though my ankle still hurts a bit. That was not the shirt, but my natural talent for football. Believe me, playing like that I bet I could even make it to the Hong Kong national squad.
And now you ask: what the hell do you know about football in Hong Kong? Well, not much, but I know a few things. For example, look at a picture of this shirt being worn in a match:
Karate kick on Edu.
That lad is Cheung Sai-Ho, one of the best footballers that ever played for Hong Kong. A few months ago, I was reading World Soccer when I stumbled upon his photo, and thought "hey, cool, that's the shirt I bought!". Then I started reading the text and realized Sai-Ho killed himself after an argument with his wife. He jumped from the window of his 36th floor flat, a sad end to a good player (they say). He played more than 50 times for his country, and he actually helds a world record: in 1993, he scored a goal just 2.8 seconds after the start of the match, while representing a Hong Kong youth team. Impressive!
Obviously, Hong Kong's international record isn't brilliant at all. They usually don't qualify for any international competitions, but in 2010 they did well in the East Asian Football Championship. They finished 4th, but there were only 4 countries participating.
Their national side is still composed with players playing in the local league, which is not that strong at all, so that explains the poor results. The national talent pool is certainly very small, so they picked Gerard Ambassa too, a cameroonian defender who's been playing there for quite a long time now.
Ambassa, Hong Kong's Rigobert Song
I'm pretty surprised they never called Detinho. Detinho is probably a familiar name to portuguese football enthusiasts. He played for Leixões, and helped them reach the Portuguese Cup Final when they were playing in lower divisions, and then helped them going up. He's a strange mix between Robocop, a wardrobe and a football player. He was sort of sucessful when playing for small teams here, scoring an interesting amount of goals, specially for 3rd tier teams. After leaving Portugal in 2006, I guess he became a sort of legend in Hong Kong, scoring 58 goals in just 4 seasons. He's a strong lad: he's almost 1.90m tall, weighs 94kg and he's ugly and looks tough.
Eusébio? No! Detinho!
A closer look. Told you he was ugly.
The funny thing is that he had a trial with Boavista like 2 seasons ago. He's 38 now, but he was still impressive. He scored some goals against stronger opponents in friendly matches, and I must say I was pretty confident he'd do really well. Unfortunetly, Citizen (a team from Hong Kong) approached to sign him and offered him a lot of asian money, so he never signed for us. He's a living legend there and won many awards and titles, so it's understandable. People are actually collecting his shirts, I bet he has many fans over there.
I bet this is a XXXL size.
Look at him, he's way bigger and stronger than most defenders (and security staff):
So, if I actually worked in the Hong Kong FA, my first proposal would be to make Detinho play for them. Not only because he'd score some goals against Laos, India and maybe Macau, but also because he'd work as a body guard later. Clever move, in my humble opinion.
This one's probably one of the rarest shirts I own. SC Verl is a small club from Germany, currently playing in Regionalliga West, the 4th tier in german football, composed mostly by semi-pro or amateur squads.
I obviously got this one in Verl, of course, after a match between the local minnows and FC Porto, during Porto's training camp in Germany. I was lucky enough to be the reporter following Porto those days, it surely meant a lot of work but it was also a great experience.
So, Porto faced Verl in a friendly match, and I couldn't miss that chance. To buy their shirt anywhere else would be probably an impossible mission, so I knew this would be a great addition to my collection. The best part is that I actually got it for free.
After the match, I still had some work to do, mostly post-match interviews. And then I had to drive all the way back to the hotel (20 minutes away) to send the match highlights and stuff to Portugal. That meant I didn't have much time to look around for a shirt. A portuguese emigrant living in Germany helped me out. I've met him when I first arrived in Germany, as he was waiting for the Porto squad in the hotel, to get some pictures and autographs. He knew some portuguese journalists from previous seasons, and he was really helpful, giving some informations about the city inviting us to some events with the portuguese community in Gütersloh.
So, when I was getting ready for the post-match interviews, I saw this guy again, and went there to say hello. And to ask him a big favor. "Hey mate, how's it going? Any chance you can check where they're selling Verl's shirts?", I asked. "No problem, I know the president, let me see what I can do.". 10 minutes later he showed up with this black shirt on his hands. "I told the president it was for a portuguese journalist, so keine probleme!". Obviously I met the president after that to thank him, and also to show how much I knew about his club. I didn't know much, actually, apart from naming some notable players. Arne Friedrich, now in Wolfsburg, started his carreer there, and then moved to local giants Arminia Bielefeld, and then to Hertha Berlin. He managed to play 82 times for the national team, so he's by far the best player ever playing for Verl. He was impressed I knew about Friedrich and some obscure african players that played there a few seasons ago.
Here's the guy playing for Germany.
I must say I was really impressed with Verl. They're from a really small town, with no more than 24.000 inhabitants, but still they've managed to play in Regionalliga for quite a longe time now. Their squad wasn't brilliant against Porto, as expected, but they managed to open the score from a long-range effort by Afiri. They eventually lost 1-3. But their structure and match-day organization was impressive. They had a lot of people helping out, they had some great communication staff, and they were actually broadcasting some pre-match interviews online. It looked more like a professional club, to be honest. Their facilities weren't great, but the stadium was ok and the fans seemed pretty enthusiastic. Check the goals:
Look, that's my shirt!
Now, about the shirt itself. It looks fantastic, really like it. It's specially great if you have in mind it's from an amateur side.
It also came with number 12 and a printed league patch.
A rare shirt, from a lower-league team from a small town in Germany, that actually looks really good. What else could a collector ask for?
I actually also managed to grab a shirt from local rivals Gütersloh, now playing 6th division football. Will post it later.
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.
I always loved kits with stripes. In England, shirts look pretty classic for some reason, and this Sunderland shirt is no exception. I believe my dad brought it from a trip to England back in 2005 or something, I was actually surprised he didn't forget about it. He also did as told, and went to Lillywhite's in Picadilly Circus, where a few months earlier me, my mom and my brother found some interesting bargains (will post those later). Since then my dad has been a good source of great shirts, and more important, they're gifts, so I don't spend a cent on them. Great.
So, this Sunderland shirt is heavy. Yeah, heavy. It feels heavy. The sponsor is not printed, and that makes it not so light. The material is not very light, too, but the design is quite good. Love the white stripe on the collar.
So, the shirt looks beautiful, but to be honest, I'm not really into Sunderland. It's not that I don't like them or something, I just don't care. I don't know much about them, except they're one of the oldest english clubs (founded in 1879, according to Wikipedia!), and that they have a really nice crest.
As you can see, their motto is Consectatio Excellentiae, which means In Pursuit of Excellence. That's quite appropriated, as recently they've been signing some players that used to be talented youngsters and potential stars (but they failed to make it). Wesley Brown, for example.
Boots? Why? It looks cool though.
Brown was, according to Sir Alex Ferguson, the best natural defender Man Utd has had for years. Ok, I must admit I always liked him. But come on, Alex. He was not that good, was he? Anyway, he was pretty unlucky with injuries. He still managed to play 232 matches for Man Utd, some of those playing as a right-back, not his best position. I just realised he's 32. Not a surprise that he retired from international football, then. John O'Shea didn't want to see his mate leaving, so he got on the same train and also signed for Sunderland.
Brown was (or is) way better than him.
O'Shea is one of those guys that seem quite clumsy, but always do well in Man Utd. O'Shea played pretty much everywhere, but he was not brilliant anywhere. He did well, though: 256 matches with the Red Devils. Not bad at all. But there's actually a diamond playing for Sunderland: Sessegnon.
Love the scarf.
I first saw this lad playing for Benin in the African Cup of Nations, and I'm not really sure why PSG sold him. He wasn't very expensive (6M€). Good job, Sunderland, you got a nice player there.
I also remember Kevin Philips scoring tons of goals for them.
Philips, legend. Now with Blackpool, aged 38.
Maybe I can still put his name on the back of my shirt.
I'll fly to London in a few weeks, hopefully I'll find some more bargains. This time I'll have to pay for them, though.
When I bought this shirt, during one of my trips to Madrid, Malaga was just a mid-table club, sometimes struggling to keep their La Liga spot, and sometimes actually going down to come back right after. Now everything is different. This season they have the 3rd highest budget in La Liga, still away from Real Madrid and Barcelona, but they're now spending more than teams like Sevilla, Valencia, Atletico de Madrid or Villareal. Obviously thanks to Sheikh Al Thani and his fortune.
They used to sign some players from portuguese clubs, like Boavista legend Litos, Benfica's Paulo Jorge, Boavista's Hélder Rosário or Belenenses' Eliseu. Now they're usually more into some big names: Ruud Van Nistelrooy, Toulalan, Demichelis, Enzo Maresca, Julio Baptista, Buonanotte or Santi Cazorla. A very talented squad indeed. Let's see how it goes for the Malaga boys.
As I said, I bought this shirt in Madrid, during a memorable 4-day-trip. I had to walk like 40 minutes under extremely high temperatures, though. I was looking for some bargains, and I thought the best place to find plenty of offers was obviously El Corte Ingles. It's a huge department store, and there's like one in every spanish town (and also one in Lisbon and one in Porto). I was quite disappointed with the small amount of shirts available: mostly big clubs, and this Malaga one was the only that got my interest. It was also cheaper than the others: it costed around 30€, I think. It has no sponsor printed, which is a good thing, as Malaga's sponsorship that season was really poor and made the shirt look not so good.
Malaga? How original.
The shirt itself looks nice. Traditional blue and white vertical strips, with some details in golden.
Back then Malaga used more of a sea-blue, now they're using a lighter blue, like sky-blue or something:
I guess I prefer the old colours though.
Malaga always remembers me of an epic UEFA Cup round between them and Boavista. Quarter-finals, I think. We lost 1-0 in Malaga, managed to win 1-0 in Bessa with a late goal from a perfect free-kick taken by Luiz Claudio, and then we won on the penalty shoot-out.
Luiz Claudio. Could have been a legend. He wasn't.
Now some more photos of the shirt, and of course, the almighty Litos playing for them:
