p**********d
发帖数: 7918 | 1 他們保持著世界杯預選賽進球最快的紀錄：8.3秒，對英格蘭隊。
One Win, 106 Losses, No Traffic Lights
Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
Fabio Bollini , 28, a defender for the San Marino national soccer team, also
works at Traslocasa, the moving company he owns with his brother. More
Photos »
By JERÉ LONGMAN
Published: October 10, 2011
SAN MARINO — This is Europe’s smallest recognized soccer nation,
population 30,000, and victories in the tiny, mountaintop republic are as
rare as the coins and stamps that make it a collector’s haven.
San Marino shares borders with Italy, but not its soccer aptitude. The
language, cuisine and Apennine range are shared with Italy, which entirely
surrounds San Marino, but cultural similarities do not extend to soccer
prowess. Italy has won four World Cups. San Marino has yet to win four games
. It has won one, to be exact, in 22 years of official competition. The only
thing more uncommon here are traffic lights, of which there are none.
On Tuesday, San Marino will travel to Moldova for a final, undoubtedly
futile, qualifying match for the 2012 European Championship. Make that
disqualifying match. In nine games so far, San Marino has conceded 49 goals
and has yet to score one of its own. In fact, it has not found the net in
any competition since 2008.
“Every time we score, it’s a bank holiday,” said Walter Giardi, a liaison
with visiting teams for the San Marino soccer federation.
In early September, the Netherlands defeated San Marino, 11-0. The Dutch
forward Robin van Persie delivered four goals, half the career total of San
Marino’s leading scorer. At the time, the Netherlands was ranked No. 1 by
FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, while San Marino was ranked 203rd, in
a tie for last with American Samoa, Andorra and Montserrat.
In 2006, San Marino lost, 13-0, to Germany, a three-time World Cup winner.
But there are always small things to be grateful for. San Marino has never
lost as hopelessly as 31-0, as American Samoa did to Australia a decade ago.
Still, it is never easy for a soccer minnow swimming with the whales of
Europe. Of 109 matches played since 1990, San Marino has won 1, tied 2 and
lost 106, scoring 17 meager goals while surrendering 468.
And yet the team of mostly amateurs carries on, determined if often
overwhelmed. San Marino enters the vast majority of its matches not hoping
to win but to lose by as few goals as possible. If soccer seldom provides
victory, though, it has provided a sense of identity.
“We are a small nation, but football gives us an opportunity to participate
in big events with big nations,” said Giampaolo Mazza, 55, coach of San
Marino’s national team. “Without football, maybe everybody thinks San
Marino is some island in the middle of the Mediterranean.”
Actually, it is a landlocked, rocky speck of a nation, located near Rimini,
Italy. The craggy views are spectacular. San Marino’s three medieval towers
rise like a sandstone wedding cake above the Adriatic coast 16 miles to the
east. To the west, mountain peaks protrude like rows of shark teeth.
San Marino has one of the world’s highest standards of health care,
according to the World Health Organization, and calls itself the oldest
sovereign republic, founded in 301. But soccer defeats are inevitable in a
microstate that has the population of Gloucester, Mass., and at 24 square
miles, is about one-third the size of Washington, D.C. (Monaco and Vatican
City are smaller in size but are not recognized by FIFA.)
There are only three professional players on San Marino’s national team.
The others are students, clerks, fitness instructors. They play for gas
money and train about three days a week, often at 9 p.m., after their day
jobs. Mazza, the coach, is a physical education teacher who receives no pay
for his soccer duties beyond expenses.
On Sept. 6, the day of a home match against Sweden, then ranked 18th in the
world, the reserve goalkeeper Federico Valentini was working in a bank when
he received a call from the soccer federation. San Marino’s starting keeper
, Aldo Simoncini, who plays for Cesena in Italy’s top league, Serie A, was
unavailable because of a hamstring injury.
“This is your moment,” Giorgio Leoni, the technical coordinator of San
Marino’s national team, told Valentini.
With little time to get nervous, Valentini played assuredly and held Sweden
to a 0-0 draw until shortly after a San Marino defender was ejected in the
53rd minute. Sweden scored a flurry of late goals to win, 5-0, against a
short-handed opponent. But Valentini acquitted himself well, even parrying a
shot from Sweden’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic, one of the world’s top forwards.
“He was so excited,” Andy Selva, San Marino’s captain, said of Valentini.
“We told him we would call him up at the last minute every match.”
It was Selva, 35, a forward, who gave San Marino its lone moment of glory,
scoring on a clever free kick to defeat similarly tiny Liechtenstein, 1-0,
in an exhibition on April 28, 2004. Eight months earlier, San Marino had
tied Liechtenstein, 2-2, the only time it has scored more than a single goal
in a match. Now it tasted rare victory.
Selva tapped the free kick to a teammate, who nudged the ball back for Selva
to curl it beautifully and elusively inside the left post from 25 yards.
His eight international goals represent nearly half of San Marino’s total.
No other player has scored more than one.
“My strength is that, when I play, every match is always 0-0,” Selva said.
There was another famous moment for San Marino, even if it came in defeat.
On Nov. 16, 1993, in Bologna, Italy, forward Davide Gualtieri intercepted a
negligent back pass against England, inventor of the sport, and punched the
ball into the net 8.3 seconds after kickoff. San Marino would eventually
lose, 7-1, but Gualtieri’s goal remains the fastest ever scored in a World
Cup qualifying match.
It came so quickly that the British radio announcer Jonathan Pearce was
famously caught in the middle of his opening beer advertisement: “Welcome
to Bologna on Capital Gold for England versus San Marino with Tennent’s
Pilsner, brewed with Czechoslovakian yeast for that extra Pilsner taste and
England are one down.”
If the goal shocked England’s soccer and radio teams, it was no less
stunning to Gualtieri and San Marino’s fans, who were unaccustomed to
seeing their team with the ball in the opponent’s half of the field.
“We didn’t expect it,” Gualtieri said. “We have so few professionals,
the disparity is so great.”
Instantly, he became a hero in Scotland, which has long been a rival to
England in soccer and most everything else. When Scotland played in San
Marino two years later, Scottish fans offered to buy meals for Gualtieri and
gave him a jersey with his name on the back. In place of a number, the
jersey said “8 seconds.”
“I still have people coming to my shop asking for my autograph,” said
Gualtieri, who runs a computer business.
Sometimes, there have been more extravagant requests.
Depending on who is telling the story, the Czech tabloid newspaper Blesk
offered San Marino either about $55,000, or all the beer its players could
drink, for a crucial victory over Slovenia in 2009. At the time, the Czech
Republic and Slovenia were dueling to qualify for the 2010 World Cup. The
offer was alluring but unquenchable. San Marino lost, 3-0.
“I knew it was beer I would never drink,” Mazza said.
There are worse things. Mazza does not make a salary, but neither does he
face the enormous pressure of his European brethren. Futility has given him
job security. While San Marino changes its head of state every six months,
Mazza has been the national soccer coach for 14 years.
“If I lose three or four in a row, I’m still the coach,” Mazza said. “If
Fabio Capello loses four in a row in England, they try to kill him.”
To raise its level of soccer, the San Marino soccer federation has built a
half-dozen artificial turf fields for year-round play and a number of mini-
pitches to encourage youth participation. The winner of its domestic league
participates in the early rounds of the European Champions League, the world
’s most prestigious club tournament. And eight youth teams with players
ages 13 to 18 hone their skills in more competitive Italian leagues.
“Basically, our main goal is to demonstrate that we have dignity,” said
Giorgio Crescentini, president of the San Marino soccer federation. “I
think we are on track.”
One shortcut will not be taken, however tempting, he said. In a country
where it is difficult to gain citizenship, and naturalization can take 30 or
more years, Crescentini said that no passports will be issued to foreigners
just to play soccer, as happens elsewhere.
“We haven’t thought about any Brazilians, because we know it is impossible
,” Crescentini said. “We won’t deviate.”
Qualifying for the 2014 World Cup begins next year. Among the teams in San
Marino’s group is England, a familiar foe. San Marino is a 5,000-to-1 shot
to qualify, but that quick goal by Gualtieri in 1993 has not been forgotten.
“We don’t laugh at them quite as much as everybody else,” said Henry
Milton, a teacher in London. “To us they have an international pedigree.” |
|
