#13 Hong Kong (Home, 2006/2008?)

19:27 asian football , detinho , football shirt collection , hong kong fa , hong kong football , hong kong shirt , south china 1 Comments

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.