Papua New Guinea
Home; 2015/16
Another one of OFC’s own-brand kits that they offered for supply to their member associations (read a little bit more on that in my Tonga post), this Papua New Guinea shirt is again of not very high quality. The crest is once more very light, and therefore what should be white is more of a pink as the red material makes its way through. It is also the same template as the Tonga and the Solomon Islands shirts in my collection. This shirt was worn for almost all adult and youth teams in 2015 and 2016. It is noteworthy that in 2017 PNG wore an altered version of this template at the u-17 OFC Cup. In that version (which is the same as that of my Solomon Islands shirt), the neck was a v-neck rather than the mandarin style here, but the big change was that it used grey instead of black for the trim (making it very similar to the Tonga shirt linked above). After this deal, PNG moved to Adidas.
Football has been played in PNG since 1884, when German missionaries brought the sport to the region. The PNG Football Association was founded in 1962 to coordinate provincial associations that were already in existence. There seems to be some confusion over when the FA actually joined their respective confederations. FIFA say they PNG affiliated with them in 1966, though the PNG FA website says this occurred in 1963. The PNG site also says they joined they became members of the OFC in 1966, though the OFC site says this happened in 1963, which is odd because the OFC was not formed until ‘66.
Whatever the dates, the PNG team have not been particularly successful since then. In fact, they went several years without playing a competitive game at one point which saw them lose their FIFA ranking. To date, their highest point has been bringing New Zealand to a penalty shoot-out to decide the 2016 Nations Cup final. While they ultimately lost that shoot-out, their second place finish surely was a confidence boost for all involved in football there. Unlike many of the other OFC nations, PNG has a massive population of over 7 million, so there must be untapped potential there to rise to be a contender at continental level. One of the main sporting stumbling block is the draw of rugby league, which is the national sport and played by all school-going children. League has been described as a unifying sport for the many tribes in PNG, in some cases allowing for a healthy release of historic war rivalaries. Rugby union is also popular, and given PNG’s proximity to Australia, even Australian Rules football is a high participation sport, and actually boasts having the second highest number of Aussie Rules players outside of Australia itself.
Perhaps the most interesting footballer to have played for the nation is David Browne. Browne was born and raised in PNG before he moved to New Zealand on a football scholarship. Playing for semi-professional Aukland City, he won two OFC Champions League medals as a teenager and subsequentially played as a 16-year-old at the FIFA World Club Cup in 2012. He again played at the Club World Cup in 2014, where amazingly Auckland City finished 3rd, beating the mighty Cruz Azul of Mexico on penalties in the Third Place Play-Off. He then went to play professionally in the Netherlands after coming through a Nike sponsored ‘Most Wanted Global Showcase’. He played underage and reserve football there with both PEC Zwolle and then FC Groningin, and even made the bench for the latter in an Eredivisie game in 2017. However, he never actually made it onto the pitch at senior level and despite still being considered a prospect he left the club in 2018 to return to Auckland City. As I put this post together, Browne has just signed for the Finland’s biggest and most successful club, HJK Helsinki, who are near ever-present in European competition.
