Dear WSC
I’ve heard some daft excuses for losing matches but Trevor Francis has surpassed even Manchester United’s grey shirts fiasco at Southampton with his moaning over Birmingham’s play-off penalty shoot-out at Preston. Perhaps the poor dear would like to consider the following points. At any ground other than Deepdale there would have been spectators behind both goals, and if the penalties hadn’t been at the Preston end they would have been at the Birmingham end. Therefore, by his logic, that would be unfair on the Preston players. If Birmingham were a better team than Preston they would have finished above them in the league table, therefore the second leg of their play-off and the penalty shoot-out would have taken place at their own ground. They only finished fifth over 46 league games so they were lucky to have any chance of promotion in the first place. If his players are unnerved by taking penalties in front of opposition fans what chance would they stand of surviving in the Premiership? In a ground filled with paying spectators it makes sense for the deciding moments to take place at the end where most of them will have the best view. Who cares whether the referee or police changed their mind about which end the penalties should be taken? The notion that the whole match should be replayed because of that is absolutely ludicrous. If I was a Birmingham fan I would be embarrassed that the manager could come out with such a lame excuse for defeat instead of accepting that his team was simply not good enough.
Richard Watts, Sydenham
Search: 'American Samoa'
Stories
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.
Oceania's masterplan to attract the attention of the football world paid off spectacularly as an avalanche of goals in the World Cup qualifiers set new records. Matthew Hall counted them all in
Nicky Salapu picked the ball from his net 57 times during his country’s four World Cup qualifiers over Easter, but then he is the goalkeeper for American Samoa, officially the worst national team in the world.
Sunday 1 Blackburn move into the second promotion spot in the First Division with a 5-0 thrashing of Burnley, prompting Graeme Souness to issue a warning: “We’ll be treating every fixture like it’s the last game of our lives.” After a 1-0 home defeat by Wolves, Birmingham’s sights are now set no higher the play-offs, where they could yet be joined by Sheffield United, who win their local derby, 2-1 at Hillsborough. Leicester’s European hopes fade with a 2-0 defeat at Charlton, but Peter Taylor has identified the problem: “We are missing a footballer.”
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.