The coach of hapless Peruvian side Union Comercio said his team deserved to go into the Guinness World Records after they conceded a slapstick goal for the third week in a row.
“I don’t think anything like this has happened to any team in the world,” Edgar Ospina, whose side are one off the bottom of the Peruvian championship, told the Web site of El Comercio newspaper. “We deserve to be in the Guinness World Records. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Union’s latest blooper came on Sunday when Argentine defender Joaquin Lencinas side-footed the ball into his own net from close-range to condemn his side to a 1-0 defeat against Leon de Huanuco.
Goalkeeper Juan Flores began the embarrassing sequence two weeks previously in a 2-0 defeat to Club Sporting Cristal with a spectacular blunder.
Having collected a back-pass, Flores nonchalantly dribbled the ball to one side of his box, before missing it completely as he went to kick to a defender, allowing an opponent to nip in and run the ball into the empty net.
In the following match against Club Universitario de Deportes, one of the opposing strikers appeared to be tripped in the Union Comercio penalty area and Renzo Reanos hoofed the ball into his own net in anger, apparently thinking the referee had given a penalty. It was the only goal of the game.
Ospina said that the incidents had at least earned international publicity for team after they gained hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
“There’s just no explanation for it. In football terms, we have been better than our opponents, we haven’t taken our chances, but there’s nothing you can do about this type of thing,” he said. “Our players aren’t robots.”
“Fifteen days ago, they [netizens] thought we were an organization of shopkeepers. At least, now they know we are a football team,” he said.
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