Home 2005/06
Matchworn by Antoni Lima 03.09.2005 AND 🇦🇩 : FIN 🇫🇮 0-0
Manufacturer: Diadora
Source: Collector
Michael and Brian Laudrup, Roland and Erwin Koeman, Gary and Phil Neville, Pippo and Simone Inzaghi, Lars and Sven Bender – the list of footballing brothers is quite long.
Yet, the siblings Antoni and Ildefons Lima Solà are hardly ever mentioned – despite having a combined total of almost 200 caps for their national team: Andorra.
While “younger” brother Ildefons, aged 42, is still going strong after playing for his country for 25 years, his older brother “Toni” ended his international career in 2009.
Making his debut in the second ever match the Andorran national team played, Toni Lima spent his career mostly in the lower tiers of Spanish football, before joining his brother at Greek club Ionikos Nikeas in 2002. The beefy centre-back earned 64 caps with the national team and faced footballing icons like Ronaldo (the buck-toothed one), Wayne Rooney, Zinedine Zidane or Robin van Persie.
Although, I still have to get a shirt of Andorra’s world-record-holding legend Ildefons Lima for my collection, I’m happy to at least tick off one of the Lima brothers’ shirts from my wantlist.
Andorra's 2005 shirts made by Diadora look like a uniform out of a cheap sci-fi movie (which isn't a bad thing, I guess) and feel like a thin wetsuit with no ability to absorb any sweat. Furthermore, they don't take prints very well, as my other model shows initial signs of cracking in the printing.
Still, the Diadora shirts are pretty rare and are vastly better than the awfully boring subsequent Adidas models.
It also completes the “Diadora collection”, as I now have all three of the Diadora models in my Andorra collection: home, away and goalkeeper.
It was worn in a more than respectable 0-0 draw against Finland in 2005. Like basically every shirt with a 2006 World Cup qualifiers patch, the patch came off, as they seem to have been affixed with a dried-up glue stick...
Thanks goes out Michael, a German collector who received the shirt while working in Andorra and agreed to sell it to me for my collection.
