Jesus people are defeatist on here. We are absolutely nowhere close to the realm of 133rd, to suggest so is mental. Do people really think we’re worse than Antigua & Barbuda, St Kitts and Nevis, Swaziland, and Andorra, a country 2/3 the size of Lake Taupo and about the same population? There are two reasons our ranking is so low:
1) We only play island teams, which do jack shark to improve our ranking;
2) Every time we do play a big team, it’s in a friendly and always experimental so we never try, hence we lose over and over with terrible squads without our best players. Look how we did against Peru in a game that actually mattered, conceding just 2 goals in 2 games, while Saudi Arabia lost to them 3-0 yesterday and Peru’s beaten other big teams like Croatia, Iceland and Scotland this year, each by two goals. Against Japan recently, where we had Wood and others playing and we actually tried, we were unlucky to lose 2-1 with Japan scoring a late winner
If we were in AFC for example, we’d be where we deserve, which is somewhere around 60-80 roughly. Enough proper competitive games to play where we’ll actually try to win instead of being experimental. Apart from Peru and the confeds, when have we not been experimental?
Games against competitive teams in non-sweltering conditions that we're not disadvantaged in include:
NZ 1-2 Mexico
NZ 1-2 Japan
NZ 0-0 Peru
NZ 1-1 USA
NZ 1-2 Mexico (again)
All very respectable.