Nine goals: what exactly was Armenia supposed to do?
Norway scored nine in Yerevan, which is less a qualifying result than a rounding error with a referee.
In Yerevan the ninth went in and the home end did something statisticians rarely get to see: it laughed. Not a happy laugh. The kind of laugh a man gives when the third bus in a row is the wrong bus. Nine goals for Norway, one for Armenia, and a European Championship qualifying night that stopped being a contest somewhere in the middle and became a demonstration.
A one-goal margin is a coin toss. A two-goal margin is a bad afternoon. Nine is geological. It sits in the small category of scores that make the fixture list look like a typo, and the Armenian players spent the closing minutes doing the only sensible thing available: chasing the ball, failing, and watching it go in again.
The away support had long since run out of celebrations and started rationing them, a goal every so often, like a man pacing a bottle. The Norwegians did not appear to be enjoying it unduly. They simply kept putting the ball where the goalkeeper was not, which, over ninety minutes, turns out to be most places.
"We just wanted to keep doing the simple things," one of them said afterwards, which is what you say when the simple things have produced nine.
Qualifying tables are built on nights like this, though not usually with so many digits. Norway take the result and the arithmetic that comes with it; Armenia take the coach home and a fixture to be got through. The scoreboard will read 1-9 in the morning, and it will read 1-9 in fifty years, and no amount of explanation will make it read better.
In Yerevan they will tell the story for a while. The number to lead with is nine. The better one is one, because that is what the evening was: one team playing, and the other one present.