Worst In The World: World Cup Qualifier: Moldova 3-0 San Marino

Saturday 19 October 2013

World Cup Qualifier: Moldova 3-0 San Marino

11^tOctober 2013

Moldova 3-0 San Marino

World Cup Qualifier

Zimbru Stadium, Chisinau, Moldova (Att. 5,000)

http://www1.skysports.com/football/live/match/253672/report

San Marino didn’t do too badly in Chisinau on Friday, lasting at 0-0 until beyond half-time. Unfortunately a repeat of last month’s goal scoring heroics wasn’t to be, and ten minutes into the second half Moldova finally got their breakthrough.

Viorel Frunza beat Aldo Simoncini, who was restored to the team between the San Marino posts, after good work from Alexandru Antoniuc. Sidorenco added a second after another goal mouth scramble, before banging home the third himself a minute from time.

So all in all not a bad showing from San Marino; a goalless first half, and keeping the score to 2 before the final minute. No goals scored though, for shame.

Group H now looks like this...

England Pl. 9 Pts. 19

Ukraine 9 18

Montenegro 9 15

Poland 9 13

Moldova 9 8

San Marino 9 0

All that remains now is for San Marino to act as sacrificial lambs to the slaughter against Ukraine on Tuesday night. Ukraine will of course need a win to try and steal top spot from England, who face Poland on the same night.

Can San Marino avoid another 9 goal humping? Let’s hope so.

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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.