Andorra will be difficult to break down

THE BARE statistics are rarely kind to Andorra, not least the one that has them tied for 203rd and last with Samoa, American Samoa, Montserrat and San Marino in the Fifa world rankings.

Their sole competitive win came back in 2004 against Macedonia, their coach, Dragan Kanatlarovski, so traumatised by the defeat – “This is indeed a shameful outcome, a humiliation” – he immediately offered his resignation.

Friendly victories over Belarus and Albania, both over a decade ago, were Andorra’s only other victories in 100 internationals.

Apart from captain Ildefons Lima, who has seven goals in 67 games (one of them against Ireland at Lansdowne Road 10 years ago), no other Andorran player has more than three goals to his name.

They sit in their customary position of bottom of the group, having lost all eight of their Euro 2012 qualifying games so far, scoring once – at the Aviva Stadium last year – and conceding 17.

Much like his predecessor David Rodrigo, from whom he took over in February of last year, coach Koldo Alvarez tends only to seek “moral victories” when his team heads into battle.

The former goalkeeper, the second most capped Andorran player of all time and officially tagged his country’s greatest ever player by the Andorran Football Association in 2006, knows better than most the challenge of keeping the opposition out: he conceded 211 goals in his 78 appearances.

With that in mind, then, Marco Tardelli’s warning yesterday that Andorra shouldn’t be taken for granted might have seemed overly cautious.

“When players think the match is very easy, that’s when the difficulties start,” he said. “Andorra are a good team, a strong team physically.”

Dig into their Group B performances to date, though, and it could be that Tardelli has a point – which, granted, is one more than Andorra have.

Only Armenia in this group have beaten them with any degree of comfort, 4-0 at home and 3-0 away: other than that, they haven’t lost by more than a two-goal margin.

Slovakia struggled to break them down in both their meetings, a single goal deciding the two games.

In the home tie, it took them over an hour to score, goalkeeper Jose Antonio Gomes keeping out everything that came his way until then.

Russia, too, discovered there were ‘no easy games in international football’ when they opened their campaign away to Andorra, needing a penalty to complete a 2-0 win, the home defence managing to blunt the Russian attack for the bulk of the encounter.

And Macedonia found it no more easy to break Andorra down, taking 40 minutes to get their first goal in their 2-0 win a year ago, before scraping to a 1-0 victory at home last month, Andorra holding out for an hour.

Defensively, then, they’ve come a long way since Koldo, a former reserve goalkeeper at Atletico Madrid, was in the side. Russia, 1999: 1-6. Portugal, 2001: 1-7. The Czech Republic, 2005: 1-8. Croatia, 2006: 0-7. England, 2009: 0-6.

That defeat at Wembley was Koldo’s final appearance for his country, the then 38-year-old applauded off the pitch when he was substituted in injury time, having made a string of saves that kept the score down.

That might have been a moral victory for the team, but they’ve become a sturdier and more disciplined outfit since then, even if most of the squad is still playing at an amateur level with Andorran clubs.

Fifteen of the 23-man squad named by Koldo for the games against the Republic of Ireland and, next Tuesday, Russia, are based in Andorra, most of the rest either ‘unattached’ or playing their football with lower league clubs in Spain.

They might still be waiting for their first competitive win since 2004, but, in this campaign at least, they’ve figured out how to make themselves difficult enough to beat. To quote Tardelli, then, if the Irish players “think the match is very easy, that’s when the difficulties start”.