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After first having beaten Andorra's Rangers 2-0 in Tiraspol, FC Sheriff repeated the feat with a 3-0 win while visiting Andorra

ANDORRA LA VELLA (Tiraspol Times) - It was a big win in a tiny country. Playing in Andorra on Tuesday night, Pridnestrovie's FC Sheriff Tiraspol beat the home team 3-0 and smattered their European dreams in the UEFA Champions League Cup 2007-2008.

Andorra, one of Europe's smallest mini-states, is so small that its territory fits inside Pridnestrovie nine times.

In the latest match in UEFA Champions League, Final phase, FC Sheriff took on the Andorra Ranger at 7 p.m, 24 July 2007, at its home base of Andorra La Vella, the 22,000-inhabitant capital of the small Principality of Andorra.

Having the home-team advantage was not enough for Andorra to beat the boys from Tiraspol. While the Rangers didn't manage to score a single goal, Sheriff put three of them away at the Estadi Comunal, the only UEFA-rated stadium in the Principality.

First goal was scored at 68 minutes by player number 14, Wilfred Balima, a 22 year old contract player from Burkina Faso.

Andorra's Rangers (top) lost to Pridnestrovie's victorious FC Sheriff Tiraspol by 0 to 3.

Second goal was scored at 72 minutes by FC Sheriff player number 19, Sasha Kaykut. Also a contract player, Kaykut is a Bosnian Serb from Banja Luka, the capital and largest city of the Republika Srpska (currently part of the Bosnia and Herzegovina in the former Yugoslavia).

Sheriff's third and final goal was scored at 84 minutes by number 11, 20 year old Alexander Suvorov, a native-born citizen of Pridnestrovie who was named after the Russian military hero who founded Tiraspol more than 200 years ago.

Last week, Rangers played FC Sheriff in Tiraspol and lost 2-0. Goals from Evgheni Gorodetchil and Aleksei Kuchuk gave FC Sheriff a two goal lead. Rangers' players arrived back from Pridnestrovie last Thursday.

Before the match, Rangers' captain Justo Ruiz declared: "I think we will see a good match at the Comunal because if we play well we can at least complicate things for Sheriff, although we can't forget they are 2-0 up and we need to score three goals."
This was not to be, as Ruiz found out after facing the Pridnestrovians for the second time.

Andorrans compare themselves to Pridnestrovie

After the match, local fans in Andorra wanted to find out more about Pridnestrovie and compared the two tiny European states to each other.

Like Pridnestrovie, the small and independent country of Andorra is also landlocked between two larger neighbors.
Whereas Pridnestrovie is situated between Moldova and Ukraine, Andorra lies between France and Spain.

But this is where the geographical similarities end. In comparison to Andorra, Pridnestrovie is a giant. Andorra has a landarea of only 468 square kilometers. Pridnestrovie, approximately nine times as big, has an area of 4,163 sq km.

In population size, Pridnestrovie is also much larger. The 555,000 inhabitants of Pridnestrovie dwarf the just 69,150 inhabitants of Andorra.

What the two small countries have in common are persistent allegations of smuggling, although little evidence exist and observers note that the accusations are overstated. To the extent that smuggling ever existed in a serious quantity, this was a problem of the past. During World War II, Andorra was an important smuggling route between Vichy France and Spain. Today, the country is surrounded by the European Union but is not an EU-member. Likewise, Pridnestrovie - which is also not a member of the European Union - has an EU Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM) on its borders to ensure that contraband does not leave the unrecognized country.

There is no dominant ethnic group in Andorra. Ethnic Spaniards are the largest minority with 43% of the population, followed by Andorran (Catalan) who make up 33%. In addition, 11% of the population are Portuguese 11%, 7% are French 7%, and the remaining 6% are made up of other groups, including Germans, Brits, Scandinavians and a small smattering of Russian citizens.

Equally multicultural, in Pridnestrovie 64.2% of the population are ethnic Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Poles, Belorussians). Ethnic Moldovans make up 31.9%. There are also several thousand Germans, Jews, Gagauz, and other ethnic groups in Pridnestrovie.

Andorra only became a member of the United Nations in 1993, exactly 715 years after its gained its independence. Pridnestrovie declared independence in 1990 but can not obtain United Nations membership or widespread international recognition until a 17 year old territorial claim by neighboring Moldova is resolved to the everyone's satisfaction.

See also:
» Regional football champion FC Sheriff turns 10 [1]
» FC Sheriff maintains solid lead; latest win of 11-1 [2]

(Photos: Xavier Pujol for Tiraspol Times & Weekly Review)