Home 2001-03 – Puma
The Country
Located in the North Atlantic, roughly halfway between Iceland and Norway, the Faroe Islands are a dull, dreary, windswept archipelago, home to around 50,000 dull, dreary, windswept residents. Technically still a Danish overseas territory, the islands are basically the moody emo millennial teenager of the Nordic family, sulkily striving for independence despite a lingering reliance on Mother Denmark – who is, like, just soooo embarrassing – for everything from defence, policing, healthcare and trade, as well as clean socks and a continuous supply of Fridge Raiders chicken bites for breakfast, lunch and dinner. A referendum on full sovereignty is supposedly in the works, although no date has been set and any agreement is still subject to the approval of reigning Danish monarch Queen Margrethe II, as if she’s their real mum or something. Ok, that metaphor’s starting to get away from me now.
Despite the twin handicap of an unfavourable climate and being thoughtlessly deficient in entertainment value, the Faroes still attract an improbably large volume of tourists, including keen ornithologists attracted by the islands’ huge colonies of nesting seabirds, and cruise ship passengers listlessly waiting for their boat to return, having exhausted the possibilities for diversion provided by removing puffin shit from their trainers. The locals, meanwhile, have their own somewhat more gruesome ways of alleviating the soul-crushing boredom, such as community organised whale hunts, a fun day out for the whole family, with the price of the meat apparently cheap enough to offset the cost of the imminently required child therapist.
This inherent need to repeatedly stab something probably has to do with the Viking blood snaking through the islanders’ veins. Indeed, the Faroese language is (along with Icelandic) the closest modern dialect to Old Norse, while the national capital Torshavn translates as “Thor’s Harbour” in tribute to the mighty god of thunder, fertility and impractically proportioned metalwork tools. That said, many historians now believe the Faroes’ initial inhabitants to have been Irish monks who, having arrived at least 300 years prior to the Viking hordes, were no doubt thrilled when the first longboats began rolling into their harbours, and greeted their notoriously stabby new chums with open arms, then, shortly thereafter, with open jugulars.
The National Team
Affiliated to FIFA in 1988, the Faroes were first thrust into full international competition two years later for Euro 92 qualification where, on the 12th of September 1990, the national side stunned the football world with a 1-0 win over Austria, a team that just three months prior had played at the World Cup finals in Italy. Key to this monumental result -played out in Sweden due to there being no grass pitches on the islands at the time – was a succession of splendid saves from legendary bobble-hatted goalkeeper Jens Martin Knudsen, who produced a match-winning performance to keep the Austrians at bay, despite looking like Noddy’s deadbeat, cider-enthusiast brother who lives in a bus shelter.
Speaking of homeless-looking alcoholic reprobates, Scotland are another country with some less than fond memories of the Faroes, thanks to embarrassing draws during their European Championship qualifying campaigns in both 2000 (1-1) and 2004 (2-2), with the latter requiring a desperate Scottish fightback from 2-0 down at halftime to deny the islanders a famous victory. The Faroes’ best ever result arguably arrived much more recently, though. In November 2014, Claudio Ranieri’s ill-fated stint in charge of the Greek national team came to a shuddering stop following a 1-0 Faroese victory in Athens during the Euro 2016 qualifiers which – given that the visitors were ranked 187 in the world at the time, while their humbled hosts sat inside the top 20 – might just represent the biggest shock in international football history, at least from a statistical standpoint. Overall, taking these results as the anomalies they clearly are, the Faroes’ true place in UEFA’s pecking order can best be summarised as “Europe’s best shite team”, i.e. a cut above their fellow micro-nations like San Marino, Malta and Luxembourg, but representing little more than a tasty goal difference booster for the continent’s biggest fish, albeit with the potential to choke any overly careless eaters.
The shirt
For the majority of their competitive history, the Faroe Islands have been dependent on Adidas or Puma to kit out their team, an arrangement that has predictably spawned a rash of uninspired, generic templates, which nevertheless command beefed up prices on ebay etc due to their relative rarity. Happily, not only did I manage to snag myself this low-key yet rather handsome design, with its duel badge/flag combination and snazzy red and blue trim, but it came on the cheap (less than £20), possibly helped by the seller listing it under the alternative “Faeroe Islands” spelling, thus potentially rendering it invisible to rival bidders. Result.
Bizarrely, some of the other replicas of this shirt that I’ve seen knocking about (both this design and the blue away version) seem to feature an inverted flag, with the colours on the Faroese cross being the wrong way round. See below.
No indication that these are fakes. Somebody at Puma just screwed up royally I guess. Hopefully they won’t make the same gaffe with the Switzerland shirts, as I’m not convinced Granit Xhaka or Stephan Lichtsteiner could be relied on to perform emergency CPR.
