Month: July 2017

British Virgin Islands – Away – 2014

The British Virgin Islands tend to have a great shirt. I’m not usually a fan of Adidas shirts, but these look really smart. I am a bit disappointed that I can’t find photographic evidence of these in use given that someone at the BVIFA contacted me to let me know they were putting an order in, and did I want any.

  Hold up, what’s this? I think I can see some BVI player sat on the bench in this shirt: green collar and everything. Photos from a 6-0 defeat to St Vincent & the Grenadines.

Further photos shown the design, including yellow Adidas logo from this match vs French Saint Martin.

Canada – Away – 2013

Canada are one of the few countries to still be supplied by Umbro, other than Malawii I’m struggling to name a single one. It’s a shame because Umbro design excellent shirts. Nothing too fancy, comfortable, and produce something unique for each shirt. This one has the sound wave to the Canadian national anthem stitched into the side of it – a nice touch.  

England – Home – 2010

 Given that I own roughly 1000 national football shirts, I don’t actually wear them very often. Mainly because I don’t find them to be particularly comfortable, you can’t really wear them under a jumper, the collars are a bit weird, and they don’t tend to be very smart. However, this shirt is awesome, it doesn’t feel like a football shirt, and avoids all the issues above. I know Canada had a similar design, but as far as I am aware these are the only countries that used this template.

Iceland – Away – 2009

  Always had a soft spot for Iceland ever since Helgi Danielsson was at Posh. Helgi made his debut for Iceland agsint India in the Millenium Super Soccer Cup and went on to earn 30 caps for his country – not many Posh players can say that.

Bhutan – Away – 2002

Used against Bangladesh on 15/01/2003 in the 2003 SAFF Gold Cup.

Kosovo – Home – 2016

An historic shirt for a number of reasons. Kosovo, the 210th FIFA member (pipping Gibraltar by mere minutes) finally joined after years of battling for the right to play football. October 6th 2016 was the day that Kosovo finally played a FIFA affiliated competitive match, a 6-0 home defeat to Croatia. More importantly, I finally completed my epic quest to collect the 211 shirts of FIFA! Now Kosovo didn’t used to be that hard to find, Legea supplied them back in their non-FIFA days, but for whatever reason I decided not to buy one then. When they join Kelme decided to arse about and not bother with replicas.

This shirt was prepared for Alban Meha who stayed on the bench all agme, and I know what you’re thinking, it looks a bit dodgy. But as you can see from these photos from that match, the details are exact: the lack of paw print on the shoulders, the seem line not matching with the blue on the shoulders, the printed details. I have no idea why the quality of the player shirts is so bad, I guess they’re only used for one off matches, the replica ones are far better. I’ve even seen photos of the collar from the changing rooms which show no label.

Guinea-Bissau – Alternate – 2017

I’ll write more about Guinea-Bissau exploits at the 2017 African Cup of Nations when I do the blog post about the home and away shirts. As far as I can see they have yet to use their 3rd or 4th kit designs, even though they were made available for sale. I guess if they ever play Celtic they’ll need it. We managed to get our hands on a few Guinea-Bissau shirts the day after they got knocked out of AFCON 2017. The red home shirts soon sold out, but limited numbers of the away, 3rd and 4th shirts are available from the Football Shirt World online shop.

Fernando De Noronha – Home – 2017

Lets face it, you’ve never even heard of Fernando De Noronha. Its an archipelago of 21 islands off the coast of Brazil in the state of Pernambucho. It’s basically the Brazilian version of the Azores. This design was used for the first time in the match vs Comunidad Armenia Argentina (The Armenian Community in Argentina?), you can see photos and read more about it here.

Fiji – Away – 2000

I’ve had the Fiji home shirt from 2001 in my collection for year, one of my best find in the early days. A very unique design, by an unheard of manufacturer. Oddly I cannot find any photos of the away shirts being in use. I guess the only time one would ever be needed would have been away games against New Zealand. This may explain why the blue shirt seems to be far more common that the white version.

Fiji were drawn along side Australia, Tonga, Samoa and American Samoa. They won 3 of their 4 matches, scoring 27 goals in the process. 13 of those goals came against American Samoa and another 8 against Tonga. They did well to lonly lose 2-0 to Australia who managed to finish with a goal difference of +66.

England – Away – 2011