Search: ' Tahiti'

Double-figure drubbings are out (almost) and shocks are in. Matthew Hall reports on how the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu upset the odds in the South Pacific qualifiers

The cliche says that if it’s 31-0 then this must be the Oceania Football Confederation’s World Cup qual­ifying competition but, thankfully, OFC took heed of record-breaking scores four years ago. A three-phase tournament now saves teams such as American Samoa the embarrassment of massive drubbings against Australia – in 2001, the Samoans actually did watch 31 goals go past their goalkeeper.

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Sepp Blatter is promising Oceania automatic entry to the World Cup, again. Matthew Hall thinks this time he may actually come up with the goods

To be or not to be? That’s the question for the Oceania Football Confederation as FIFA promises the qualifying process for the 2006 World Cup will be decided in Madrid this December. The proposal, from none other than the president Sepp Blatter, is that Oceania takes the guaranteed qualifying place freed up by the decision that the holders will no longer qualify auto­matically for future World Cups.

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Cris Freddi  dredges up some of international football's worst mismatches. If you come from Guam, it's probably best to look away now

Gotti Fuchs must be kicking himself in his grave. Back in 1912, Germany seem to have taken their foot off the pedal immediately after he’d scored his tenth goal against Russia. There were still 20 minutes to go (around the same as when Archie Thompson hit double figures against American Sam­oa), but Fuchs’s tenth was their last. They probably thought enough was enough, but if they’d set him up for a couple more he would have broken the world record instead of equalling it, and they wouldn’t have fallen one short as a team. A more genteel era? Only relatively – 16-0 isn’t exactly what you’d call merciful.

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Cris Freddi trawls further through the dustbins of 20th century football by selecting champion crap sides from the merely awful

This is a category you know you’re not going to be able to cover properly. For a start, there are so many poor teams around, at every level. Selkirk losing 20-0 in the Scottish Cup, Hyde 26-0 to Preston in the FA Cup, the Austrian club who lost every match in a season except the one in which their opponents didn’t turn up because they’d folded. There’s always some schoolboy side cheerfully conceding dou­ble figures in every game. We could all make acceptable lists and none would look the same.

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Australia have once again failed to qualify for the World Cup. Mike Ticher questions what will become of football in the country after their latest elimination

Australia have lost to some curious teams in their efforts to qualify for previous World Cups – Kuwait, Indonesia, Fiji – but France ’98 was surely the worst beating they had ever handed out to themselves.

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