Worst In The World: Preview: Sri Lanka v. Bhutan

Saturday, 19 October 2013

Preview: Sri Lanka v. Bhutan

6^th September 2013

Sri Lanka v. Bhutan

SAFF Championships Group Stage

Halchowk Stadium, Kathmandu, Nepal

And so to the final ~~nail in the coffin~~ chance for a result for Bhutan, and indeed for Sri Lanka as the two sides battle it out to proves they are slightly better than inept. Having both lost in various humblings to Afghanistan and Maldives, qualification for the semi finals in a long forgotten dream. It is all about not being bottom of the group.

For our intrepid Bhutanese this is the most realistic chance of something other than a defeat, and the chance to climb from the foot of the world rankings.

History is not in their favour however. In four previous meetings, Bhutan have achieved the square root of bugger all, managing four defeats, 11 goals against, and no goals scored. Three of these defeats came in SAFF Championships group matches, with the match in Colombo in 2008 seeing the two teams fight over top spot in the group, as both made it through to the knock out stages.

Past meetings:

4^th April 2006 AFC Challenge Cup Chittagong, Bangladesh Bhutan 0-1 Sri Lanka

6^th June 2008 SAFF Championships Group Stage Colombo, Sri Lanka Sri Lanka 2-0 Bhutan

6^th December 2009 SAFF Championships Group Stage Dhaka, Bangladesh Sri Lanka 6-0 Bhutan

3^rd December 2011 SAFF Championships Group Stage New Delhi, India Sri Lanka 3-0 Bhutan

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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.