It's rare for any manager to come into the post-match press conference after a handsome victory and question the quality of the opposition, the point of the fixture and the relevance of the result.
But that was exactly what then-Socceroo boss Frank Farina did in Coffs Harbour back in April 2001 after his team of top-level professionals had blown away the youngsters, amateurs and ill-equipped triers from American Samoa 31-0.
I covered that game - part of a round robin of fixtures in the Oceania Football Confederation World Cup qualifying group of which the Socceroos were then part - and could only find myself in agreement with Farina, who was asking for FIFA for a future change in the conditions of those qualifiers to prevent such appalling mismatches.
As Archie Thompson and his teammates piled on goal after goal (the scoreline represents a strike rate of a goal inside every three minutes, quite a statistic considering they didn't get their first until Con Boutsianis scored direct from a corner in the 10th minute) the existential questions around such a fixture became ever more apparant.
Was it designed to provide competitive entertainment? Clearly not.
Was it designed to give the Australians match practice? No, as the first eleven would have had a far tougher work out had they played an ''intra club '' match against the other 11 members of the squad.
Even Thompson, who ended up in the Guiness Book of Records for netting 13 times in that one game - the best individual haul ever recorded in an international- found little to take succour from.
He was then heading to Belgian club Lierse and subsequently said that the 13 goal record was a real millstone round his neck as every time he took the field in Europe fans - not quite realising just how terrible American Samoa were - expected him to rack up huge numbers of goals.
It was one of the most extraordinary matches I have ever covered but for all the wrong reasons, and it is hard to think of a more ill-starred or ill-equipped team than the American Samoans, who faced problems with passport issues and turned up in Australia bereft of most of their senior team, having to use youth players instead.
Goalkeeper Nicky Salapu was the one senior player they had, and, bizzare as it might sound, he actually had a good game: were it not for some of his saves the score might have blown out even more.
Undaunted, the American Samoans all came together in the dressing room post match and sang loudly, putting the defeat into perspective.
Australia topped the group (having beaten Tonga 22-0, Samoa 11-0 and Fiji by a relatively disappointing 2-0 margin) before going on to eliminate New Zealand in the two-legged Oceania play off.
The end of the road came a few months later when they lost 3-1 on aggregate to Uruguay.
A Kevin Muscat penalty had sent Farina's men to Montevideo with a slender advantage following a 1-0 triumph at the MCG, but a Richard Morales brace following Dario Silva's early first goal saw Uruguay progress 3-1 on aggregate in the intercontinental playoff.
It was, of course, to be a different outcome four years later, but that is a different story!