Worst In The World: World Cup Defeat...Again

Friday, 22 March 2013

World Cup Defeat...Again

11^th September 2012

Stadio Olimpico di Serravalle, Serravalle, San Marino

World Cup Qualifier

San Marino 0-6 Montenegro

As expected San Marino started their World Cup campaign with a defeat at home to a decent Montenegro side, losing 6-0.

San Marino even had the chance to take the lead in this one, a rarity indeed. But of course it was the goals at the other end that came soon enough. They seemed to come in bursts, with two first half concessions within two minutes of each other midway through the first half. A third was added not long after half-time but then it seems the fitness levels of the professionals told more and more a three more were added late on.

As such it’s not a totally disheartening defeat for San Marino, although the downside is that there was never much prospect of a goal being scored. It’s going to be a long hard slog for San Marino. This is just the first of many expected tonkings and sets the benchmark for how their future results in this campaign will be measured.

Highlights of Montenegro’s goals can be seen here...

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San Marino (0) 0

Montenegro (2) 6 Djordjevic 24, Beqiraj 26, 51, Zverotic 69, Delibasic 78, 82

San Marino - Aldo Junior Simoncini, Fabio Vitaioli, Alessandro Della Valle, Davide Simoncini, Cristian Brolli (Damiano Vannucci, 83), Matteo Coppini, Alex Gasperoni, Michele Cervellini, Danilo Ezequiel Rinaldi, Matteo Vitaioli (Pier Filippo Mazza, 81), Manuel Marani (Enrico Cibelli, 64)

Montenegro - Mladen Bozovic, Vladimir Volkov, Marko Basa, Stefan Savic, Miodrag Dzudovic, Milorad Pekovic, Simon Vukcevic (Elsad Zverotic, 65), Fatos Beqiraj (Filip Kasalica, 76), Dejan Damjanovic, Luka Djordjevic (Andrija Delibasic, 66), Stevan Jovetic

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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.