Afghanistan 3

 

Unknown Player
vs. Malaysia (1:1) | Friendly | 2016 in Malaysia

I am back. After five years of silence on here, I have decided to upload a bunch of shirts again to this blog. While I have experimented with a new blog in the meantime - Shirtlock Holmes - it never really worked for me. It's style and form, but also it demands to picture quality, just exceeded the time I can actually spend on blogging, unfortunately. It will remain online for the time being, but I will hopefully use blogger a bit more frequently again to dump the hundreds of pics I bought in the meantime that have never seen the light of the day...

To kick things off, here is the most current Afghanistan shirt. I really did not need to have it, as I already had a matchworn and squad signed shirt, which I do love a lot. But this one, finally, came with a bit of a design. I simply could not resist picking it up. I mean: IT HAS A LION on it! How cool is that!?

Obviously, a lot has happened in Afghanistan between 2016 and the time of writing this, especially impacting women's football in the country. Briefly after the Taliban takeover in 2021, FIFA still helped organising a friendly of the women's national team in one of the World Cup stadiums of Qatar, a signal of hope and support for women in Afghanistan, as Qatar and FIFA put it back then. Shortly after, FIFA of course left it to the now Taliban-led Football Association of Afghanistan to govern women's football again. To the surprise of absolutely no one that meant that the Afghanistan women's national team, now based in exile in Australia, has become "unofficial" and only ever played one more match: Against a selection for the Southern British region of Surrey. A match organised by a friend of mine - Danny - who runs the Surrey International Football Association and, importantly, very much without any support whatsover from FIFA. One could say that FIFA only ever once cared about women in Afghanistan: When they could be used for a publicity stunt of the shameful Qatar World Cup.