East Timor: No Longer the World’s Worst Team

No one wants to be known as the world’s worst team. And to be fair East Timor were actually only the world’s joint worst team, sharing that dubious title with the seven other international teams ranked =200th by FIFA in October 2008.

But you can still imagine the relief when East Timor finally ended six years of nothing but crushing losses and recorded their first ever non-defeat with a 2-2 draw against Cambodia on October 19th.

East Timor (aka Timor-Leste) actually led 1-0 at half-time, but a draw against a nation ranked 17 places higher (joint 182nd) is still damn fine work.

“It was the first game we didn’t lose — we’re all very proud,” said long-serving, long-suffering coach Pedro Almeida, a motorcycle mechanic in the country’s sleepy capital Dili.
“We are not happy with our world ranking and we are hoping our players will continue to improve,” he told Reuters.

At one end of international football you have the corporate cash orgy that is the World Cup. At the other end you have East Timor, whose hardships would be funny if they weren’t true.

If you had any sympathy for under-fire but overpaid international coaches like Sven-Goran Eriksson, prepare to lose it:

“We have no resources to keep this team together and we barely have grass to play on,” says Almeida. “The squad changes constantly because the players have families and cannot afford time off work. When they are 21 or 22, they have to quit.”

Some coaches talk about needing certain things in order to improve. Things like more time with their players or more co-operation from clubs. And they’re probably right. But at least they have grass pitches to play on. Almeida could do with one of those.

“We cannot see our first win coming in the next few years but we will never quit,” he said.
“But soon we will get our first good pitch and we hope to have another. That will help our players to develop and represent their country at a much better level.”

We’ll find out in Novemeber if the draw against Cambodia moves East Timor out of that pack of 200th ranked teams with zero FIFA ranking points (for the record, the other seven are San Marino, Anguilla, Guam, Montseratt, the Cook Islands, American Samoa and Papa New Guinea). But in reality, your FIFA world ranking means nothing. Your first draw after six years of defeat means a lot lot more.

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