Good first half for us, could have been 4/5
Tahiti really arent up to much.
I know we have to win this to qualify but it's largely a waste of time, beating these teams never helps our global rankings which in turn means we arent a drawcard for any bigger teams to bother with so our opportunities to get teams to come and play us at home are limited.
Guess we just keep beating up on the little guys and hope we get more opportunities away from home.
Tahiti really arent up to much.
I know we have to win this to qualify but it's largely a waste of time, beating these teams never helps our global rankings which in turn means we arent a drawcard for any bigger teams to bother with so our opportunities to get teams to come and play us at home are limited.
Guess we just keep beating up on the little guys and hope we get more opportunities away from home.
Winning this tourney will definitely improve the ranking of the AWs. It’s the primary reason NZF did an about turn and entered at pretty late notice
Will have 2 quality friendlies in Sept and OFC WC qualifying will be done and dusted by next year’s March window. Post that it’s likely means 10 or more good friendlies in the lead up to WC 2026
Moving from 107 to somewhere in the 90's is an improvement but until we can get ourselves somewhere into the 50-60 range we are never getting any respect from the footballing world.
Apparently the New Caledonia game being cancelled will cost the AWs some ranking points, but below is a rough summary of how the AWs have shot up the rankings by winning previous editions of the Nations Cup.
I think Carlind at the start of this thread did a more detailed anysis of how FIFA's points system works, and certainly the AWs if they win the tourney will end up higher than mid 90s.
Someone said in the other thread that AWs jumped 54 FIFA places when they last won the ONC. That was with Hudson in PNG in 2016.
That looks about right. In this Wiki link is a table of the AWs FIFA rankings every year since 1992. Someone smarter than me can maybe copy the table in this thread. But in 2016 their best rank was 88th & worst was 161st. They did yes move 54 ranking spots in one go that year.
RankYear Best Worst
109 | 2016 | 88 | 161 |
FYI - looks AWs best rankings were 47th (2002) and 49th twice (2003 & 2010).
There were big jumps yes in years when the AWs won the ONC.
2016 54 places
2008 57 places
2002 41 places
1998 31 places