Worst In The World: Friendly Result: San Marino 0-3 Albania

Tuesday 24 June 2014

Friendly Result: San Marino 0-3 Albania

San Marino 0-3 Albania

International Friendly

Sunday 8^th June 2014

Stadio Olimpico di Serravalle

San Marino had kept Albania at bay for almost half an hour, restricting them to a few long range efforts but nothing too dangerous. San Marino even managed one or two attacks of their own, though naturally none of them were particularly threatening.

The opener from Mergin Mavraj came on 28 minutes after Armando Vajushi looped over a free kick from close to the right corner flag and Mavraj rose above the defence at the back post to head home. Mavraj is a German born former German U-21 international, but chose to play for the nation of his parents (Albanian Kosovans). This strike was his first international goal in 17 appearances.

This was the prompt for an intense period of pressure from Albania, and only a few minutes later, wide man Armando Vajushi added a second, and likewise it was his first international goal. Cutting in from the right he fired a stunning left foot shot into the top corner beyond Simoncini in the home net. Unstoppable.

Emiljano Vila added the third in the second half to round out the victory with an equally impressive strike. The ball rebounded around the edge of the box and flew up above Vila who crashed home a terrific volley.

A 3-0 defeat it may have been but if there's any consolation I suppose it can be found in the fact that Albania had to score two very impressive goals to see out the win.

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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.