The Kiribati national football team is the national football team of Kiribati and is controlled by the Kiribati Islands Football Association. Kiribati is not a member of FIFA but is an associate member of the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC), and is therefore not eligible to enter the FIFA World Cup but may enter the OFC Nations Cup. It became a provisional member of the N.F.-Board on December 10, 2005.
As of April 2012, Kiribati has played only ten games in its history, all at the South Pacific Games, two in 1979, four in 2003, and four in 2011. The biggest wins for Fiji and Vanuatu have been against Kiribati, 24–0 and 18–0 respectively. Kiribati have yet to win an international match, and have never played at home, not least because there is no adequate playing ground suitable for an international match. (Bairiki National Stadium is a sand pitch rather than a grass field.) In ten games, Kiribati has scored four goals and conceded 122.
In 2012, Scotsman Kevin McGreskin became the team's coach, with an aim to improve its results and obtain recognition from FIFA.
Read more about Kiribati National Football Team: Background, Complete International Results, Current Squad
Famous quotes containing the words national, football and/or team:
“[D]rilling and arming, when carried on on a national scale, excite whole populations to frenzies which end in war.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
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“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
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