Montenegro's Rapid Ascent Stuns England In England's World Cup qualifying match against the tiny nation of Montenegro on Tuesday night in the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica, there were no bullying tactics by the Montenegro team, as the English press claimed there had been when the teams played to a draw on the same pitch two years ago. There weren't any chairs thrown at the visiting team's goalkeeper as there had been in Montenegro's match against Poland last fall. There even appeared to be less of a water-logged pitch than the English press had voiced fears of the day before. Instead, there was a Montenegro team that dominated the second half against a seemingly rattled England, the fourth-ranked team in the world. This, despite England having more than twice the number of registered soccer players as Montenegro has people (657,000, a population about the size of Baltimore's). The game ended in a 1-1 draw, and with only four games left in World Cup qualifying, Montenegro maintained its hold on first place - and a spot for automatic qualification - in their group. It was the third time the two teams have played each other, and the third time they have played to a draw. Branko Brnovic, Montenegro's coach, has been at the helm for two of those draws. He took over the team after the controversial firing of the Croatian Zlatko Kranjcar in September 2011. In Brnovic's first match, late in Euro 2012 qualification, England had led 2-1 until substitute forward Andrija Delibasic scored an equalizing header in extra time. England had an excuse afterward; Wayne Rooney had been given a red card, and the team had to play a man down for the final 25 minutes. "We played with them nil-nil at Wembley [in 2010] and maybe people thought, "Oh, it was surprising, but you were lucky," " Montenegro defender Stefan Savic said last fall. But we played again on our pitch 2-2. When we played again a draw, it is not luck. It is quality. Whatever anyone thought about that statement at the time, it would be hard to argue with Savic now. Montenegro's greatest strength is its forwards. Its two stars are among the most accomplished strikers in Italy's Serie A, Juventus's Mirko Vucinic and Fiorentina's Stevan Jovetic. The two are so good that the temptation for the team has been to simply organize defensively and hope the two of them can take care of the rest. It's what Kranjcar did so successfully before his firing and what Brnovic did in his team's victory against Ukraine in Kiev last October. "We will maybe park a bus in defense," Brnovic said before Tuesday's match against England, "but we also have two Ferraris in attack." Jovetic, who drives a Lamborghini, might have preferred a different metaphor. Yet Montenegro's performance in the second half of Tuesday night's match, when it was trailing 1-0, showed a different team - a far more fluid and attacking one. Four days earlier, in Chisinau, Moldova, after a lackluster and scoreless first half, Montenegro put that attacking style on display, even after losing midfielder Milorad Pekovic to a second yellow card in the 61st minute. The team was rewarded when Vucinic scored the winning goal late in the game. Moldova is no England, and few thought all that much about the victory, but Montenegro demonstrated a comfort in attack that it had displayed only once before under Brnovic, in the final half of its loss to the Czech Republic last fall in its Euro 2012 qualification playoff. When it tried to do the same against Poland in its opening match of the current World Cup qualification campaign, it looked like, well, a team from a country whose population is 657,000. That performance was likely responsible for its defensive, counterattacking approach against Ukraine last October. To begin the second half against England, Brnovic brought on a third forward, Dejan Damjanovic, a leading goal scorer for FC Seoul in South Korea's K-League. The game immediately took on a different tempo, with Jovetic nearly scoring on a header and Vucinic missing a golden opportunity 12 feet in front of the goal, both within the first 15 minutes. In the 75th minute, Brnovic brought on Delibasic, a fourth striker, and a minute later - after a great save by Joe Hart following a Montenegrin corner and then a mad scramble in front of the goal - Damjanovic scored. Until Tuesday night's match, Delibasic's goal against England in 2011 had been the most famous in the team's history. After Montenegro secured the draw, Damjanovic's goal had likely eclipsed it. And Damjanovic might have become a national hero in the process. If that seems like hyperbole, take into account that Montenegro has been a country for all of seven years and is still in the process of developing, not only economically and politically but culturally as well. In an interview last fall, Balsa Brkovic, the nation's leading literary figure and author of the best-selling novel "Paranoia in Podgorica," sounded almost equally as excited by Montenegro's first Olympic medal, a silver won last summer by the women's handball team, as he did outraged by its prime minister's allegedly corrupt methods of governing. Montenegro played its first ever soccer match six years ago, a friendly against Hungary. "It had never before rained as hard in Podgorica as it did that night," the team's media officer, Ivan Radovic, said. The team gave up a goal in the first minute, but sometimes reality doesn't conform to foreshadowing the way literature does. Vucinic scored the country's first ever goal in the second half, and the team went on to win, 2-1. "From that game we became what we are today - a team, an association, everything," Dejan Savicevic, the team's president and one of the great Yugoslavian players when he played in the "90s, said. Before that, we really didn't have the thing to touch. Ever since the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1992, Montenegro had been living in the shadow of Serbia as a part of the federal republic of Yugoslavia, later renamed Serbia and Montenegro. In Montenegro's 2010 World Cup qualification campaign, it won one of 10 matches and finished fifth in its group of six. The team has already won four matches this qualifying campaign, and when it next takes the field, against Ukraine in June, it will be two points clear of England in first place. As Savicevic said, Montenegro's soccer team has come a long way in only a few years. Tuesday night, it showed just how far. David Gendelman is the deputy research editor at Vanity Fair.