Every club side and nation suffers the occasional horrorshow, a game where nothing goes their way and panic leads to disorder. A ninety minutes to well and truly forget.
And mostly they can forget, as the never-ending nature of football churns up more fixtures and a humiliating massacre is quickly consigned to the past.
Only that doesn’t quite apply to World Cup disasters, not when most of the planet is watching on, peering through their fingers, and articles such as this serves to remind us that even on the biggest stage mismatches can occur.
Germany 8-0 Saudi Arabia (2002)
The Green Falcons impressed in their inaugural World Cup eight years prior, progressing to the last 16.
In their second World Cup outing they finished bottom of their group but really there was no shame in losing to Denmark and the hosts France.
By 2002 the pervading thought was that this former international minnow was steadily growing in stature and that Germany, in their opening game, would prove to be a rigorous test of how far they had come.
Some even took to the sports betting and backed an upset.
The first 20 minutes went as expected, Die Mannschaft bossing possession and carving out opportunities but falling short against a hard-working Saudi rearguard.
Then Miroslav Klose broke the deadlock and the proverbial floodgates opened. The Green Falcons still had a long way to go.
Uruguay 8-0 Bolivia 0 (1950)
The disjointed structure of the 1950 World Cup meant that Group 4 consisted only of Uruguay and Bolivia, the two-time world champions essentially given a bye by being paired with the South American minnows.
So it proven to be as La Celeste ran riot from the off, finding themselves three to the good with just 23 minutes on the clock.
The latter stages of this cruelly one-sided affair would have prompted copious examples of the Simpsons’ ‘Stop, he’s already dead’ meme’, had memes been around back then. Or social media for that matter.
Uruguay went on to draw with Spain, then narrowly beat Sweden, before famously unseating Brazil in front of 174,000 at the Maracana.
The defeat spiralled Brazil into an identity crisis, soon after changing their kit colour from white to the yellow we know so well today.
Sweden 8-0 Cuba (1938)
Currently ranked 166th in the world, just above Bermuda and Chinese Taipei, Cuba are anything but a major player on the international scene. This was similarly the case way back in the nineteen-thirties.
Which meant that qualifying for that summer’s World Cup was a feat in itself, and when the Cubans opened their account with a victory over Romania – secured via a replay – a story for the ages was beginning to emerge.
Regrettably, the pen ran dry on that story the moment they were paired with Sweden, a considerable presence in world football until they fell away in the Sixties.
Cuba’s second and last appearance at a World Cup finals proved to be a horrible mismatch that saw Harry Andersson and Gustav Wetterstrom each grab a hat-trick.
Yugoslavia 9-0 Zaire (1974)
It feels immensely unfair to gloss over a nine-goal hammering and the victorious team who executed it but the really fascinating story lies with Zaire.
The first African nation to reach a World Cup finals found themselves under-estimated and patronised on reaching Germany and determined to prove a point they duly tore into Scotland in their opening fixture, showcasing their buccaneering, attacking football.
They were ultimately unlucky to lose 2-0. It is at this point alas when things turned hopelessly awry.
Delighted at ‘his’ team’s performance, the feared dictator Mobutu sent over a huge fund of money, for anything the players needed, as well as flying over a small army of government officials to ‘help’ them.
Unfortunately these officials only helped themselves to the money, every cent of it. Included in the fund was the player’s wages and bonuses.
Unpaid, feeling ripped off and utterly demoralised, the Zaire team went out and played shambolically against Yugoslavia. Was it in protest? It very possibly was.
Hungary 9-0 South Korea (1954)
The football odds were short indeed on Hungary claiming the 1954 World Cup.
They were, after all, by some considerable distance, the best team on the planet at the time, known to some as the ‘Golden Team’. To others they were the ‘Mighty Magyars’.
In Ferenc Puskas they possessed a slightly portly, bona fide genius while striker Sandor Kocsis wasn’t half bad either, going on to establish himself as a superstar at Barcelona.
Moreover, their tactics, and the manner in which they deployed them, were little short of futuristic.
A year earlier, they had gone to Wembley and made an England team featuring Billy Wright and Stanley Matthews look like a relic of the past, thrashing them 6-3.
Putting this majestic collection of players up against South Korea therefore just didn’t seem fair. It was David vs Goliath but Goliath had the slingshot and stones.
In their next match, Hungary pulverised Germany eight goals to three but ultimately lost to the same side in the final in the ‘Miracle of Bern’.
Hungary 10-1 El Salvador (1982)
To compare the Hungary side of the early Eighties to their nineteen-fifties predecessors is to compare a pub band to the Beatles.
Furthermore, even by their modern standards, this was a team past its best, with aging players on the decline.
Pertinently, they would go on to lose to Argentina and draw with Belgium, exiting alongside El Salvador in the group stage.
Does the record-breaking score-line therefore reflect how atypically brilliant Hungary were on this particular day? Or how terrible the Central American outsiders were?
All we know is that fitness absolutely played a part, with Hungary firing seven of their goals in the second period.
And oddly, 10-1 always sounds significantly worse than 10-0.
*Credit for the photos in this article belongs to Adobe*
