Worst In The World: They nearly scored! But didn’t. Poland 5-0 San Marino

Thursday 28 March 2013

They nearly scored! But didn’t. Poland 5-0 San Marino

26^th March 2013

Stadion Narodowy, Warsaw

World Cup Qualifier – Poland 5-0 San Marino

A glance at the scoreline suggests the usual surrender to a stronger team, albeit with the goals account count not getting as high as might have been feared.

But behind the scoreline there were a few incidents of real note for San Marino. Firstly, Aldo Simoncini in goal made several decent stops, a couple of which were in the firsts 10 minutes alone. And secondly, a last minute breakaway saw Danilo RInaldi clean through on goal with only Artur Boruc to beat, and a chance to make a piece of Sammarinese footballing history.

Sadly it wasn’t to be. Artur Boruc spoiled it for everyone who isn’t Polish by racing out and staying big to stop Rinaldi’s shot from getting past him. So affronted were the Poles at this nasty showck that they went straight down the other end and banged in their fifth goal from Jakub Kosecki.

The initial breakthrough had come with a penalty, one of two in the match both scored by Robert Lewandowski. The other two came from Lukasz Piszczek and Lukasz Teodorczyk.

So San Marino fell to another heavy defeat, and also now are officially eliminated from the World Cup. Unsurprisingly they are the first European side to be eliminated, but are not alone. Also returning their Brazilian brochures after Tuesday’s matches are Andorra and Scotland.

Poland (2) 5 Lewandowski 21 (pen), 50 (pen), Piszczek 28, Teodorczyk 61, Kosecki 90+2

San Marino (0) 0

Poland – Artur Boruc, Bartosz Salamon, Eugen Polanski, Gregorz Krychowiak, Robert Lewandowski, Jakob Wawrzyniak, Kamil Glik (Jakub Kosecki 46), Adiran Mierzejewski, Kamil Grosicki, Arkadiusz Milik (Lukasz Teodorczyk 59), Lukasz Piszczek

San Marino – Aldo Simoncini, Alex Della Valle (Lorenzo Buscarini 80), Mirko Palazzi, Fabio Vitaioli, Alessandro Della Valle, Gianluca Bollini (Simone Bacciocchi 57), Matteo Vittaioli, Fabio Bollini, Matteo Coppini, Andy Selva (Danilo Rinaldi 51), Alex Gasperoni

Other Group H results:

Montenegro 1-1 England

Ukraine 2-1 Moldova

Current Standings: Pl. Pts.

1. Montenegro 6 14

2. England 6 12

3. Poland 5 8

4. Ukraine 5 8

5. Moldova 6 4

6. San Marino 6 0

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What's This All About?

It’s all too easy to focus on the successful teams in international football, Spain, Brazil, Germany etc. We all know what’s going on with them, usually winning, and can easily follow their crowning glories on the international stage. But what about life at the other end of the scale?

FIFA’s world rankings allow us to easily see who is officially the worst national football team in the world, and this site simply follows that team (or teams) until they manage to drag themselves kicking and screaming from the foot of the world rankings to be replaced by someone even worse. And then we follow them instead.

In the past the FIFA rankings made it clear who was the very worst of all, as the complex ranking formula rarely caused a tie for last place. Since 2006 the formula has been rather simplified, I won’t go into detail but many factors were removed to make things easier to understand. The result though is that down at the bottom of the rankings we often now have a cluster of ineptitude (or should it be a splat of ineptitude?) with several nations judged to equally as useless as each other for the simple reason that they lose all their games. In the past they’d have received some credit for a narrow defeat against a top side, but no more. To get off the bottom they are going to have to win or draw a match, something that often proves beyond most of them.

We’re here to highlight their struggles against hopelessness, and bring the occasional heart warming story of marginal success.