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Very specific football question No.6: Which team has had the most disastrous European Championships qualifying campaign (yes, even worse than Holland)?
Nemanja Matic has not reproduced his Chelsea form for Serbia © Getty
France 2016 was supposed to be the party where everyone was invited. With the European Championships expanding from a slimline 16 teams to a bloated 24, you didn’t need to top your group to qualify. Hell, you didn’t even need to come second. Even a third-place finish in a pool of six would be enough to get you into a play-off, where you’d only have to beat some other team that scraped into the top half of their group. It’s been predictably plain sailing for England, while Wales and Northern Ireland are among the smaller nations whose qualification dreams were made realistic by the new format. But things haven’t gone to plan for everyone.
Holland have been the most high-profile under-performers, losing twice to Iceland and then being battered by Turkey to leave them perilously close to an embarrassing elimination. Euro 2004 champions Greece have also had a shocker. Beaten home and away by the Faroe Islands, the Greeks have amassed a total of two goals from eight games and failed to win once. World Cup qualifiers Russia and Bosnia have played themselves into trouble, while Gibraltar have managed to overtake San Marino and Andorra as the continent’s most reliable whipping boys. But there is another team whose performance has been even more abysmal than all of these.
It’s Serbia.
Don’t believe us? Let’s start by rattling off some names in Serbia’s squad, along with their clubs. Nemanja Matic (Chelsea), Branislav Ivanovic (Chelsea), Aleksandar Kolarov (Man City), Adem Ljajic (Inter), Matija Nastasic (Schalke), Dusan Tadic (Southampton), Aleksandar Mitrovic (Newcastle). We’ll stop there because it’s getting boring, and because by now you should have got the gist that it’s a highly skilled bunch. In fact, in an alternative reality, you could imagine those players as the core of a Belgium-style golden generation of Serbian talent. But the reality we find ourselves in is the polar opposite: it’s one where Serbia have one point from six games and sit bottom of Group I, just below Armenia.
The man tasked with leading Serbia’s campaign a year ago was Dick Advocaat, who said following his appointment: "We have only one target, and that is to qualify.“
He resigned three competitive games later, saying: "I have never faced such a difficult situation in my entire career.” And even managing Sunderland won’t change that.
Serbia’s campaign did not fully recover from its second game - a home match against Albania that was abandoned after 41 minutes when a drone carrying a political banner sparked clashes involving players, coaches and fans on the pitch. Serbia were deducted three points over the debacle, but those points would have made little difference to their qualification hopes. They didn’t win a game until last Friday - a 2-0 victory against Armenia that offered scant consolation.
After the team’s third match, a 3-1 home defeat to Denmark that was played behind closed doors because of the Albania incident, Ivanovic hinted at a rottenness at the core of the national team.
“We see ourselves as big stars and always think we are better than others and that’s a very bad attitude. The players are obviously unaware what it means to put on a Serbia shirt. This has been going on for years and we can’t carry on like that,” said the Chelsea defender, before the team duly lost their next two games.
Given Serbia’s inevitable slide in the FIFA rankings, their World Cup qualifying group - Wales, Austria, Ireland, Moldova, Georgia - could have been a lot worse. Advocaat was enticed by the squad’s raw ability, but the challenge for whoever attempts to lead Serbia to Russia 2016 will be rebuilding confidence and morale after one of the most disastrous qualifying campaigns in European history.
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