/ 1 September 2006

Football minnows are wasting everybody’s time

The advent of micro-countries introduced a new terror to international football. You could beat them and still be humiliated. Fifteen years ago, for example, Scotland won 2-0 in San Marino but the goals took a while to come.

The game is remembered best for the public school drawl of the late Ian Archer in a radio broadcast: ”We’ve been playing for an hour and it has just occurred to me that we’re drawing 0-0 with a mountain top.”

Similarly, England’s seven goals against San Marino in 1993 are immaterial. Fans would struggle to recall who racked them up, but everyone knows that Davide Gualtieri opened the scoring in eight seconds after a bad back-pass by Stuart Pearce.

All of that, however, was a long time ago and the novelty value of the mini-nations has worn off. No one marvels any longer that San Marino, with its population of about 29 000, can put a team together. Nowadays, you have to wonder what such sides give to football and what they get from it.

There may not be anyone in the crowd at Old Trafford on Saturday who is fascinated by Andorra. At the close of the evening, the citizens of this statelet will be none the wiser about when the team will gain its first-ever point in a European Championship qualifier.

They are at a disadvantage against England even when it comes to gathering their best players. Marc Bernaus, for instance, is a little too good to be in Manchester. He has a full-time, professional career and will be pursuing it with Elche in a Spanish second division game against Albacete.

With the football programme so congested it is bizarre that occasions such as England’s appointment with Andorra are allowed to clutter the diary.

The right to international status itself is not the main issue. Considering that, in constitutional terms, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are merely regions of the United Kingdom it would indeed be prudent to keep quiet on that topic.

There should, instead, be sporting criteria that prove a team merits a place in the top flight. The small, disadvantaged countries can cope intermittently with international football. There might only have been 116 spectators there but Andorra (population: 74 000) did defeat Macedonia at home in October 2004.

The Faroe Islands (population: 47 000) startled the whole of Europe in their first competitive international, by beating Austria in 1990. That game was played in Sweden because there were no suitable facilities for a genuine home match to be staged.

Nowadays, though, the Faroe Islands has proper stadiums in Toftir and Torshavn. In the qualifiers for both the 1998 and 2002 World Cups they avoided ending bottom of their group.

There is no problem in allowing such teams to pursue whatever dreams they hold. Sport needs and demands it. The real trouble is that international football is not competitive enough. No particular price would be paid even by a national side that lost every single fixture for year upon year.

That complacent sterility is shamed by comparison with the vigour of the pyramid system at club level.

Ideally, the 12 sides with the worst records in the Euro 2008 qualifiers should have to compete for half a dozen places in the European zone of the 2010 World Cup qualifiers.

Those who lost would get their next chance two years later when the six poorest teams from Europe’s World Cup qualification groups dropped down to meet them in pre-qualifiers for Euro 2012.

In consequence, only 46 of Uefa’s 52 members would ever appear in the group phase. That, in turn, would slim the size of the groups and shave a couple of matches from the overly congested fixture list that each country has.

Until the international structure is overhauled, there will always be sides like Andorra who have nothing to hope for and nothing to fear. — Â