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Starvinho

By Starvinho
in Myke's Sports Bar

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METALMAN
METALMAN

I should probably point out that I just made these up to see if anyone would believe me.

Hobo
Hobo

Shut the fuck up. This is the kind of bullshit I didn't want to hear. All you ever do is piss on the US team. WELL, YOU GOT YOUR FUCKING AMMO! ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? HUH? ARE YOU HAPPY, YOU LITTLE BITCH?

Thrilla
Thrilla

ITV have finally come to their senses and sacked Adrian Chiles.

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Something I found on reddit:

Quote

The World's Greatest International Teams #203: The Most Serene Republic of San Marino

Right, I’ve been looking forward to this.

When we use the word ‘bad’ in football, it typically comes in relative terms. A player dismissed as ‘awful’ in the Premier League would probably look pretty solid a couple of tiers down the league system. Similarly, ‘woeful displays’ are usually hyperbole, with the occasional notable exception (cough, 7-1, cough). But San Marino’s status as the world’s pinnacle joke team is the stuff of myth and legend. Over their 27 years as a footballing nation, San Marino have conceded an average of 4.4 goals per game. Calling them a glutton for punishment would be giving gourmands everywhere far too much credit.

With all that being said, they are always damn fun to play as on FIFA. Trying to win the World Cup with them is the EA Sports equivalent to “Through the Fire And Flames”.

Football in San Marino

San Marino’s existence as a country is one of those geographical quirks that arises when an area has too much history. It was officially founded by Saint Marinus in 301 AD atop the prominent Mount Titano, where it steadily became a haven for small groups of Christian mountain dwellers. Their development as an ascendant footballing nation was hampered in the team’s earliest years, with many balls being lost over the mountain’s edge, and many ball-boys being martyred trying to get them back. To counteract this rapid loss of supplies and child labour, the residents of Mount Titano were among the first to develop the short free-kick, alongside a quick passing game that their modern iteration always successfully fails to replicate.

Time passed. Many of the great events of world history passed San Marino by: the Crusades, the discovery of the New World, and the Bosman transfer saga to name a few. And yet somehow their status as a distinct sovereign republic remained, leading to their current circumstance, whereby a nation with barely enough citizens to fill the Riverside stadium can go toe-to-shin with world champions. Thomas Mueller once infamously criticised this arrangement and received a strongly-worded letter from San Marino’s press officer in response. The points it made were many and all effectively directed Mueller as to where his comments could be shoved.

San Marino’s Remarkable League

The national round-robin is a surprisingly competitive and colourful affair. Here’s just a few of the most noteworthy clubs:

  • Tre Fiori, the most decorated side in Sammarinese football history, with flowers all over their training ground in honour of the club logo. They’ve also won seven league titles.

  • Murata, the first team in the country to be given entry to the Champions League qualifying rounds. They celebrated by signing legendary Brazilian centre-back Aldair, but still lost out 4-1 to Finnish champions Tampere United. Aldair played eight more times before finally deciding that there were better things he could be doing with his life.

  • Tre Penne, who owe their beginnings to the Sammarinese Fascist Party of 1928, providing an extreme right-wing to the country that the national squad has never found. Nevertheless Tre Penne remain the only team from San Marino ever to win a game in European competition.

  • San Giovanni: Even in San Marino, someone has to come last. That team is usually San Giovanni, who have the dubious honour of being the only team in the country never to win any silverware. After 69 years against just 15 other teams. Somewhere far up amongst the clouds is the gleaming threshold that is rock bottom.

The National Squad

San Marino burst onto the global scene in 1990 like a ripe tomato on a hot summer’s day. What has since followed is either very heart-warming or very daft, depending on your outlook; only the press always seems to consider it very indicative of current form. Due to the fact that matches against bottom-placed group teams are discounted at the end of qualifying, San Marino games have reached an advanced level of utter meaninglessness that the rest of professional football merely strives for. Their tactics involve, in practice, the use of a 9-0-1 formation designed to stifle opponents and reduce them to four goals rather than ten. Such innovative use of ten outfield players, each capable of filling in any position that ends in ‘-back’ has led San Marino to be credited with a whole new style of play: Partial Football.

It may not have brought success, but it has certainly earnt them a place in the annals of history. At the time of writing, their summary of results sits at Played 143, Lost 138, Drawn 4, and Won 1.

That One Match

Cast your mind back to the distant, archaic past, 2004. Usher was being played everywhere, Blockbuster was turning a hefty profit, and Arsenal were still being drawn against Bayern Munich in the round of 16. But on the 28th April, San Marino were setting up for a friendly. Their opponents? Mighty Liechtenstein. The game was a replay of a match played the previous year, a 2-2 away draw that had set pulses racing amongst any true Sammarinese. Now they were on their home turf, and the tetras of the footballing world were about to become minnows. One early goal from national legend Andy Selva was enough to settle it, San Marino running out 1-0 winners in a match that had everything so long as you demanded nothing. For the Liechtenstein manager, Martin Andermatt, it remains perhaps the very worst managerial debut in history.

Star Players

  • Andy Selva: “If San Marino are on a pitch, and there’s no-one there to play them, can they score a goal?” One of the great rhetorical questions of international sport. The answer is, of course, a resounding yes - but only when this man is on the field. Otherwise it comes with a hint of uncertainty, and a nervous tug of the collar.

  • Andy Selva: As the most successful Sammarinese player by a considerable margin, Andy really is remarkable. The whole nature of Partial Football is that it requires someone with infinite patience to sit at one of the field while they wait for their team-mates to punt it towards them. Andy sometimes punts it upfield to himself too, just for kicks.

  • Andy Selva: Truly a God of Sammarinese football. The precedent that allows Caster Semenya to run, Andy was also forced to take testosterone-reducing pills by UEFA because otherwise he’s too damn tough for the other team to handle. Further, rumour has it that his vision is so extraordinarily acute that the ‘goal-line technology’ system is just Selva watching in the stands with a green button on one knee and a red one on the other. Allegedly, Nasser Al-Khelaifi even came to him before Neymar this summer, but found himself unable to match Selva’s buyout clause: the price was an ounce of humility.

World Cup Qualification Chances:

Let’s be honest, they’ve been thrown into a group with [insert name here, it really doesn’t matter]. Going to be a tough ask, I reckon.

TL;DR: The closest thing international football has to Burton Albion away, the only shame greater than losing to San Marino is refusing to play them at all.

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