For Serbia & Montenegro's soccer team, the embarrassing 3-2 loss to the Ivory Coast (after leading 2-0) was the exclamation point to a disastrous World Cup performance in which they lost every game and were outscored by eight goals. Even before the final game, the players were complaining that the national anthem (a communist-era tune entitled 'Hey Slavs!') used to introduce the team only made them depressed (AP) and the coach had promised to quit (BBC). Worst, though, was an observation made in the New York Times that suggested that many Montenegrins were actively rooting against the squad.

In his quasi-budget travelogue for the Times, Matt Gross recounts this anecdote from a bar in Montenegro:

The dozen Montenegrin guys drinking 1.50-euro Nik beers at Scorpio were cheering not for their home team but for their apparent opponents, Argentina.
Actually, it wasn't their home team, they explained: Of the 11 players on the Serbia and Montenegro team, only two were from Montenegro—and one was on the bench. To ever-louder hoots from the men of Kotor, Argentina ended up winning the game with a humiliating 6-0 lead. The losers that day weren't Montenegrins, but the Serbs.

(After the game, ESPN—with a rarely-displayed sense of humor—produced an article featuring a photo of dejected looking Serb players with the caption: 'S&M: Whipped by Argentina.')

Montenegro residents voted in a referendum to split from Serbia on May 21, and the tiny country of 600,000 people declared independence on June 3 (AP). So perhaps it would make sense that many within the country would be upset that a team supposedly representing their nation only featured one Montenegrin starter, keeper Dragoslav Jevric (who told ITV that he's considering playing for the Serbian side after the split).

But Damir Jovanovic, the editor-in-chief of JadranSport.org—a website that covers soccer for all former Yugoslavian nations—told Gelf that he doubts that the attitude witnessed by Gross is commonplace. "Many people in Montenegro after the referendum cheered and will still cheer for Serbia & Montenegro," he wrote over email, explaining that the referendum passed only by a small margin and that there are few within Montenegro who have bad feelings about their neighbor.

Now, though, if Montenegro hopes to make it back to the Cup, it will have to qualify on its own. Jovanovic is confident that the new country produces enough talent to do so: "If Slovenia made it to the Euro 2000 and World Cup 2002, so can Montenegro."