No, this wasn’t a baseball score.

Soccer. Football, for you non-Americans.

This was a semifinal match of the Asian Cup (I wanted to call it “the Oz-Uz game”), and the Aussies trashed Uzbekistan.

I’ve seen a lot of soccer by now, but I don’t recall attending one that ended 6-0. I have a vague recollection of the U.S. defeating, oh, Honduras perhaps 5-0 in the Coliseum maybe 17-18 years ago. Joe-Max Moore had three goals, maybe even four.

But 6-0? No. And I didn’t feel like I saw one team play great, as much as I thought the other team quit. Which made it quite hard to watch, actually.

I wrote about this for The National. Chuck Culpepper and I are in Doha, covering the final week of the Asian Cup.

He saw the good match — Japan and South Korea, going all out for 120 minutes, getting to 2-2 and then deciding things in a shootout.

I saw what I thought would be a good match. But when Harry Kewell scored in the first few minutes, and Sasa Ognenovski added one off a set piece about a half-hour later … the Uzbeks collapsed.

“Quit” might apply, as well. And their coach was flabbergasted by the whole thing.

(Turns out, they have a history of getting crushed in the Asian Cup; guess they’re not exactly the Comeback Kids of world soccer.)

I had a chat with a UAE colleague, just before I walked from the Main Media Center to Khalifa Stadium about the match … and we agreed the Uzbeks had a shot. Though I did know that both their goalkeeper and their best playmaker had left the previous game early with apparent injuries, and Uz would miss them if they couldn’t play.

I spent at least an hour doing research on Uzbek soccer, Uzbek sport and Uzbek history. In case they won, I might want to drop a fact or three into the story.

(To wit: The Uzbek football federation was founded in 1992, a year after the Soviet breakup. Best club in Uzbekistan, currently, is FC Bunyodkor; historically, it is Pakhtakor Tashkent. Most famous Uzbek athletes: The boxer Ruslan Chagaev, briefly the WBA heavyweight champion, and a cyclist whose name was so difficult I didn’t even write it down. Oh, and the country is the second or third biggest exporter of cotton in the world, but in the process of watering all that cotton the Aral Sea is drying up, which is an environmental disaster. Population 27 million. Mostly a dry, rocky, slightly mountainous country, capital is Tashkent, same guy has been president for almost 20 years now, it borders Afghanistan on the north and perhaps my favorite stat — Uzbekistan is one of only two countries in the world (Liechtenstein is the other), that is double-landlocked. That is, all the countries that touch Uzbekistan are also landlocked. So anyone Uzbek keen on seeing an ocean or even a sea has to cross two borders to do it.

Anyway, the Uzbeks quit. They had a guy red-carded for a head butt, and they kept getting beaten back upfield, and the Aussies poured it on.

In a way, the match says something unflattering about Asian football. Can you imagine 6-0 in the semifinals of any other continental championship? Europe, Africa, South America, North America? Of course not. Yet Asia had produced a field weak enough that a team as athletically and mentally fragile as the Uzbeks got to the semis.

Hmm.

I hope for a better final on Saturday. Japan and Australia. Should be.

And maybe the worst part of this, for the Uzbeks? They have to come back and play a third-place game on Friday, against South Korea. Wonder if they will bother to show up.