'My pie looked more like scoring': Our writers pick the worst games they have ever attended
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:The Athletic UK Staff
After the horror of Brentford 0-0 Tottenham, our experts select their personal lowlights from a lifetime watching football
It felt like The Athletic’s Jack Pitt-Brooke was speaking for many who had the misfortune to watch Brentford 0-0 Tottenham Hotspur on New Year’s Day.
“I really hope that is the worst football match that takes place in 2026, in any league, at any level,” he wrote on X. “If there’s anything worse than that, something’s gone wrong.”
That game was certainly bad — worse than bad, in fact — but how does it compare to some of the other horror shows our writers and editors have witnessed over the years?
We asked for a selection of their lowlights.
Oliver Kay: England 0-0 Algeria (2010)
The first one that came to mind was a terribly hungover afternoon at Walsall with a Bournemouth-supporting mate in 1995, but I’ve gone for England vs Algeria because there’s something particularly compelling about a terrible game on a big stage.
England were awful throughout the 2010 World Cup, and in their second group game, against Algeria, they looked utterly paralysed by fear. Algeria acquitted themselves well, but everything England did was so laboured it was like watching a match at 0.5 speed.
England vs Algeria — a terrible football match (Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images)
In the early stages of the game, a pigeon decided to settle on the netting of the Algeria goal. It stayed there for the rest of the first half, evidently sure it was the safest place to be, and when I lost sight of it at half-time, I assumed it had swapped ends.
The whole game was played out to a vuvuzela soundtrack, but at the end, even that was drowned out by boos.
Phil Hay: Juventus 0-0 Milan (2003)
The UEFA Champions League final, May 28, 2003. It was scientifically impossible for this game to be as bad as it was (even allowing for it being Italy on Italy, therefore a natural defensive love-in).
Check out the royalty in both line-ups. Juventus: Buffon, Thuram, Ferrara, Tudor, Montero, Camoranesi, Tacchinardi, Davids, Zambrotta, Trezeguet, Del Piero. Milan: Dida, Costacurta, Nesta, Maldini, Kaladze, Gattuso, Pirlo, Seedorf, Rui Costa, Shevchenko, Inzaghi.
I remember precisely nothing about the final, apart from being at Old Trafford and the quiet murmur of a crowd who could see it was going nowhere other than a penalty shootout. On the basis that I remember so little, I sometimes wonder if I was actually there at all.
Milan took the honours, such as it was, winning 3-2 on penalties, and Carlo Ancelotti took his first Champions League title as a coach. All they’d say is a win’s a win, which is undeniably true.
Milan’s Filippo Inzaghi celebrates in front of a bored crowd at Old Trafford (Paolo Cocco/AFP/Getty Images)
Gregg Evans: Torquay United 1-0 Walsall (2010)
The fact I can still remember this game has nothing to do with the football.
The memorable aspect came from it being so cold that my laptop froze during a period of inactivity. And not ‘froze’ as in suffered a technical glitch: it literally accumulated a layer of ice.
A struggling Walsall team, then at risk of relegation from League One, visited Plainmoor to take on League Two opponents in a far from glamorous second-round FA Cup tie.
Snow lined the M5 on the way down from the West Midlands and the journey seemed to take forever as I squeezed alongside two colleagues in the back of a local radio reporter’s car.
Walsall, the team I was covering, were dreadful. They conceded a penalty late in the first half, which Billy Kee converted, and that was that. When my suitcase-sized laptop packed up midway through the second half, I had to ‘phone in’ my report the old-fashioned way. Fortunately, it wasn’t very long.
Simon Hughes: Wolves 0-0 Liverpool (2010)
It was midweek, I remember that. And it was cold, I certainly remember that. I was hungry and decided to buy a Balti pie to warm me up, but after the first taste, I realised it hadn’t been cooked through.
I left it on my desk in the press box and watched it slowly freeze in front of me. It was more entertaining than the football, and by the end of the night, the pie was a hard block, much like the defences of both teams.
Ronald Zubar tackles Maxi Rodriguez. Pie not pictured (Clive Mason/Getty Images)
If there was a meaningful shot on target, I don’t remember it. It was a typical Liverpool performance in Rafael Benitez’s last season in charge. Incredibly, Mick McCarthy described Kevin Doyle’s performance up front for Wolves as one of the best he’d ever seen. In fairness, he occupied Liverpool’s central defenders, but, mate, the pie looked more like scoring.
The first was tennis superstar Novak Djokovic appearing on the big screen. He was last seen five minutes before half-time, with no guarantees that he stayed. Such a decision would have been blameless.
The other was the strange charade of Denmark trying to defend while avoiding making any sort of challenge, knowing that their superior disciplinary record would see them qualify as second-place finishers in the group.
This was a 0-0 draw where the seconds were being counted down from roughly the 48th minute, featuring a combined four shots on target, and where the cups thrown onto the pitch by Serbian fans were more reflective of the utter purgatory of existence than any exasperation at the result itself.
It was Waiting for Godot without humour, food without seasoning. Han Solo probably had a more interesting time while frozen in carbonite. The match was forgotten except by those who endured it; the thought of giving it an unmerited second life by mentioning it in this article gave me serious pause.
Denmark vs Serbia was the epitome of a 0-0 draw (Andrej Isakovic/AFP via Getty Images)
Abi Paterson: AFC Wimbledon 0-0 Chesterfield (2025)
Before filing, I thought I’d check the stats for Brentford vs Spurs to see if my match was worse. And it is. At least Jack Pitt-Brooke saw five shots on target — we had four in this League Two game from earlier this year, which were all Wimbledon’s.
After that, my memories of the day were listening to the group of people next to us with faux-posh accents, a half-time pie, and Haydon the Womble posing on a wheelie bin a la Kate Winslet in Titanic.
Actually, maybe my game was better… just not for footballing reasons.
Twenty-two footballers are outshone by Womble on a bin (Abi Paterson)
Seb Stafford-Bloor: Oxford United 1-7 Birmingham City (1998)
Eight goals, sure, and Birmingham played really well at times, but it was one of the first heavy home defeats I’d seen, and Oxford were so bad as to be described as unprofessional.
Their Manor Ground is long gone, but it was a strange place. More a collection of incongruous sheds than a stadium, it could be a uniquely miserable environment when Oxford were not playing well and when, as on that day, it was bitterly cold on top of Headington Hill.
They were 0-4 down at half-time and only scored their consolation once the seventh Birmingham goal had gone in. It was greeted by the sound of loud, sarcastic cheering by the old London Road end and by Malcolm Shotton, Oxford’s moustachioed coach, who could have used the Pringles logo as a passport photo, throwing his jacket into the crowd in sarcastic celebration.
It was not a good day’s football.
Malcolm Shotton’s moustache was the highlight of Oxford’s day against Birmingham in 1998 (Steve Mitchell/EMPICS via Getty Images)
Amitai Winehouse: Bristol City 1-0 Huddersfield Town (2019)
In a bid to jog my memory about the actual details of this game — my brain just conjures up a sensation of being frozen to the core while sat in a deserted stadium for what felt like days on end — I went looking for old match reports.
Most of them describe this victory for Championship Bristol City — with half their players sick — over Premier League Huddersfield Town as an ‘upset’, and part of the magic of the cup.
If there was magic at play at Ashton Gate on January 5, it was dark magic of the sort entire fantasy series are built around. That’s the only way to explain a goalkeeper playing a goal kick straight out for a corner.
In the end, instead of an orphaned youth discovering his mysterious power to save the world, Josh Brownhill fired home to avoid extra time in a game that barely merited 90 minutes. Statues have been built for less.
Andrew Fifield: Crystal Palace 1-3 Crewe Alexandra (2003)
‘Selhurst Park under the lights’. It’s a phrase that conjures images of feral fans, fuelled by jerk chicken and Cronx beer, slavering over the advertising hoardings as some Premier League aristocrats nervously peer out of the portable cabin that passes for an away dressing room, already contemplating a humiliating defeat.
The reality is… rather different. Selhurst Park under the lights tends to be a thoroughly miserable experience, for home supporters at least, and has been for some time. There is a generation of fans who will swear blind that Palace lost 1-0 at home to Barnsley on at least six different Tuesdays in the early 2000s, and it’s a habit that has not been lost in an age where the club — historically speaking — is at an all-time high.
The one that sums it up is this game against Crewe 22 years ago, when Palace produced a performance of such existential incompetence that many of the pitifully small crowd of 12,259 wondered whether they would ever see a home win again, with or without floodlights.
The mood was encapsulated when a south London pea-souper rolled in with Crewe already 2-0 up, prompting chants of “We want fog” from supporters spying a possible postponement. Sadly, the game continued, but at least the majority of us couldn’t see it.
Fog could not save Palace fans from a 3-1 defeat to Crewe in 2003 (Ian Walton/Getty Images)
Charlotte Harpur: England 1-0 Haiti (2023)
I don’t have a visceral memory of the worst game. France were dubbed “boring” at the 2024 European Championships and their 1-0 win over Austria, thanks to an own goal in their opening game, could qualify, but then Kylian Mbappe added some drama with his broken nose.
The worst game was the one I was supposed to be at but wasn’t. A concussion injury prevented me from flying to Australia for the 2023 Women’s World Cup and as I tuned in to watch England kick off their campaign against Haiti on TV, there was a deep hollow pit in my stomach.
The feeling of missing out — now that’s the worst.
Andy Naylor: Brighton & Hove Albion 0-0 Darlington (1997)
I can’t really remember the game (what do you expect, it was in the dark ages!), but it was during one of the two horrible seasons of ground sharing at Gillingham.
They played for an hour against 10 men after Darlington goalkeeper David Preece saw red and it must have been awful, because everything was back then.
A bad team, scuffling in the lower reaches of the fourth tier. A mind-numbing journey for ‘home’ matches, a 150-mile round trip involving four motorways. A couple of thousand diehards trying to create an atmosphere in a soulless environment.
