Worst In The World: Preview: Afghanistan v. Bhutan

Saturday, 19 October 2013

Preview: Afghanistan v. Bhutan

2^nd September 2013

Afghanistan v. Bhutan

SAFF Championships Group Stage

Halchowk Stadium, Kathmandu, Nepal

Bhutan start their SAFF Championships campaign with probably their hardest group match against Afghanistan. This will be the fifth meeting between the two sides with Bhutan looking to record just their second victory.

Their only victory to date came in the first meeting between the two sides in the 2008 SAFF Championships where a 3-1 win in the group stages in Colombo, Sir Lanka, helped Bhutan qualify for the semi-finals that year – their best SAFF performance to date. Goals from Yeshey Dorji and two from Yeshey Gyeltshen proved decisive that day.

Since then, it’s been three straight wins for the Afghan’s, most recently in the 2011 SAFF Championships with a stonking 8-1 win. It would seem that Afghanistan have got their game together and have improved leaving Bhutan behind, but we shall see.

Past meetings:

8^th June 2008 SAFF Championships Group Stage Colombo, Sri Lanka Afghanistan 1-3 Bhutan

23^rd March 2011 AFC Challenge Cup Pre-Qualifier Gurgaon, India Bhutan 0-3 Afghanistan

25^th March 2011 AFC Challenge Cup Pre-Qualifier Gurgaon, India Afghanistan 2-0 Bhutan

7^th December 2011 SAFF Championships Group Stage New Delhi, India Bhutan 1-8 Afghanistan

And a nice little youtube clip to end on. Here are some Afghan fans celebrating their AFC Challenge Cup win in 2011...

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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.