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A cocktail of improbable results

A cocktail of improbable results

By Steve Alabi
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I took an unusual voyage into Europe over the weekend because of the allure of the oldest club football rivalry in the world, the El Clasico. Even though I watched the 277th edition in delayed mode, I found it thoroughly enjoyable. The game had all the trappings of a dramatic encounter. Barcelona were on a four-match winning streak in the La Liga, Real Madrid on a mixed bag of two wins, one draw and one loss in their last four league matches and a seven-game winless run against their fiercest rivals in the Clasicos. Barcelona had their magician, Lionel Messi on the field. Nobody was wearing Madrid’s Number 7 made magical by Cristiano Ronaldo, who’d moved to Juventus two years ago but whose presence in the stands enveloped Santiago Bernabeu with his unmistakable aura. Hollywood scriptwriters could not have crafted it better.

The only probable outcome of the cracker was either victory or draw for Barcelona. Only chronic Madridistas expected victory for the home team. Their last two games had effectively derailed their season, or so it seemed. Four days before the El Clasico, stuttering English champions, Manchester City whose own league season has unraveled under a ruthless onslaught from a rampaging Liverpool, came to the Spanish capital and unleashed their anger on Madrid with a 2-1 triumph in the Champions League eighth finals first leg. Earlier the previous weekend, lowly Levante, surviving in the middle of La Liga, hosted and roasted the Los Blancos 2-1. In contrast, Barcelona came fired up after a pulsating 1-1 draw away to Napoli in the Champions League and a comprehensive 5-0 mauling of Eibar in the league.

Ninety minutes of furious but sometimes cautious football lifted the gloom in the Bernabeu for the Madridistas and transferred it to the Catalans who suffered their first Clasico league defeat since April 2016. The magicians of the day did not come from any of the known superstars, not Messi nor Benzema, not Suarez nor Isco, not Antoine Griezmann nor Gareth Bale, not Gerard Pique nor Sergio Ramos. The main magician of the day was a certain 19-year old Brazilian, Vinicius Junior whose 71st minute opener made him the first teenager after Messi to score in a Clasico. The other was a 26-year old Spanish-Dominican, Mariano Diaz who had scored only three goals in 13 appearances since he began his second stint in Madrid in 2018. His fourth settled the game in an improbable score of 2-0. Interestingly, Mariano was the player who wore the Number 7 after Ronaldo departed for Turin but wears 24 this season.

Twenty four hours earlier in England, champions in waiting, Liverpool were torn to shreds by basement side, Watford 3-0, an improbable result that brought their unbeaten run to a crashing halt. The reigning World and European club champions were on the verge of another history – a 19th consecutive league victory but Watford had different ideas. A certain 22-year old Senegalese, Ismaila Sarr was the club’s record wrecker, posting two audacious goals past the hitherto impregnable Liverpool defence and assisting the third goal in a decisive thrashing.

What the football world expected was a tight Liverpool rear and ferocious attack, and a weak Watford back and tame forwardline. What it got was the exact opposite. By the 3-0 triumph, Watford became the first side to beat Liverpool in the Premier League since Manchester City in January 2019. The victory helped to keep Arsenal’s Invincibles’ incredible record of 49-game unbeaten run set in the 2003/04 season intact but it did not stop the Gunners from being stunned 2-3 by Olympiakos Piraeus with a last gasp goal at the Emirates last Thursday in the Europa League in another improbable outcome.

Not only the North London club and Liverpool suffered unexpected turn in England last week. Indeed, the cocktail of improbable results was well served in the English Premiership over the weekend. Arsenal’s neighbours, Tottenham Hotspurs looked comfortable while leading Wolverhampton Wanderers in their shining arena until the visitors unsettled them with an equalizer and a third winning goal in quick succession. The 2-3 defeat helped the Wolves to leapfrog Spurs to the 5th position and dropped Jose Mourinho to unfamiliar territories.

A week before all these tumblings in European football, a certain English man, Tyson Fury, who parades himself as the Gypsy King, was in the US shredding into pieces bookmakers’ predictions in his second WBC heavyweight title fight versus Deontay Wilder. In the first fight which ended in a controversial draw, Fury led on the cards of most boxing experts before Wilder unleashed a bomb that took his lights out. But like The Undertaker in the WWE, Fury amazingly rose up at the last second to beat the count. This incredible resurrection did not persuade bookmakers and fans to rate him ahead of Wilder for the rematch.

Not only did he beat Wilder, he did it by a technical knockout. He floored the champ four times though two were ruled as slips. Wilder wasn’t himself after his first fall, and wasn’t helped by a bloodied left ear that did not stop bleeding. The beating was so much that his handlers threw in the towel in the 7th round to halt the pummeling.

Improbable results give sports the defining character of unpredictability and the fans that great satisfaction of underdog triumph that only sports can give. Everyone has been talking about these results. Some will go into sports folklore forever, others may last only a few years, and some others only fleeting. How I wish we could get such here the way it happened over there. The sad thing is that improbable results over here are most likely to be influenced.

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