You gotta start somewhere, so here’s my first attempt at a t-shirt design for October’s trans-continental tour.

Essential reading for any exiled footsoldier!!!

Jockroaches – Simply The Best

We’re a right yo-yo team aren’t we? We rocket up the rankings to our best-ever position of 14th without kicking a ball, and then we win two matches away from home without conceding any goals and slip back down to 23rd. What’s that all about???

The ranking system is a peculiar beast. It works on a rolling four year period, with the results in the most recent years within that period given greater weighting (100% for results in the last year, 50% the year before, 30% three years ago and 20% four years ago). So despite our wins against Austria and the Faroes (both ranked below us) boosting our points total this month, the ranking points we were awarded for our draw against Germany (ranked much higher than us at the time) a little over four years ago has fallen off our total.

Our wins away to Estonia and at home to Trinidad & Tobago in 2004 have also now slipped into year four of our record and have a lower weighting; and our win at home to Moldova and draw away to Belarus in 2005 are also in year 3 rather than year 2. In general, we seem to perform very well at the end of the domestic season – last May we won the Kirin cup in this period (early in May – those results slipped down from year 1 to year 2 last month) and in the 8 matches we’ve played at the end of the season over these four years we’ve won four and drawn four, scoring 12 and conceding only 3 in the process.

Looking ahead, our ranking is likely to take a bit of a battering over the next few months. The next five results to drop off our total are from that run of form in late summer of 2003 (Berti’s golden era) where we won three at home to the Faroes, Lithuania and Holland, drew 0-0 in Norway and were narrowly beaten in Dortmund. Although I think a narrow defeat and a total pumping both count for nul points. And speaking of total pumpings, in about six months time I would fully expect our ranking to get a boost as the matches in Amsterdam and Cardiff (the start of Berti’s broon era) will soon become nothing but a horrible memory! It’s also worth noting that the only other wins from Berti’s reign that are still having a positive effect on our ranking are the two against Estonia and T&T I mentioned earlier, so we have every chance of seeing an encouraging surge up the rankings table in 2008, just as we have done over the last year.

Of course we need to be replacing all of those defeats with as many wins and draws as possible! That means doing the business in our remaining qualifiers – particularly as competitive games count for more than friendlies, and any points won against high ranking teams count for more than those won against the diddy nations. Italy are currently number 1, France 2 and Ukraine 13 in the rankings, so anything in these games will be a huge boost to our ranking as well as to our chances of a holiday in the Alps next summer. Our must-win matches against Lithuania and Georgia, who are languishing down in 79th and 97th place respectively, won’t have too much of a bearing on our ranking, although every little bit helps!

If you’re still awake you can read more about how the ranking system works here