Worst In The World: World Cup Qualifier: Ukraine 9-0 San Marino

Saturday, 19 October 2013

World Cup Qualifier: Ukraine 9-0 San Marino

6^th September 2013

Ukraine 9-0 San Marino

World Cup Qualifier

Arena Lviv, Lviv, Ukraine (Att. 34,000)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/england/10292206/Ukraine-9-San-Marino-0-match-report.html

A full house in Lviv came expecting to see blood, and that’s exactly what they got. In fact it was Ukraine’s biggest ever international win in their 20 or so years of history. It’s no coincidence that this was also their first match against San Marino.

For Ukraine this served as useful target practice ahead of next week’s rather bigger match with England, but for San Marino it was never going to be anything other than a futile attempt at stemming the tide.

Federico Valentini was picked in goal and did his best, but of course his best was never going to be good enough. His goal was breached for the first time after 10 minutes, and the ninth and final goal came in stoppage time.

I’ll not trouble you by going through every goal, but they can be witnessed in all their glory here...

So it’s on to Tuesday and Poland at home for the poor Sammarinese. Quite what they took from this game I don’t know. Five bookings is their most notable stat. The only way is up from here.

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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.