Korea DPR 1:0 Italy
Ayersome Park, Middlesborough, England 19 July, 1966
The others were very shocking. As has been noted, Leicester winning the league (which is a much better barometer of the quality of a team then a one-off) is the most shocking modern sports result IMO.
As for the two noted above, S. Korea got some incredible home calls on their run to the semi-final. Really questionable stuff.
And the SA team were atrocious and couldn’t defend. Really not all that shocking.
Agreed. By the end, you’ve gotten somewhat used to the fact that it was going to happen. At some point it became “they can’t screw this up, can they?!”
Far more shocking for a one game result out of no where.
Those desperation shots almost never succeed, but they’re tried often enough that “almost never” still adds up to quite a few. I’ve seen at least a couple in person-- You certainly can’t identify any single game based just on that.
I think the Brazil-Germany game is the best example. Brazil hadn’t lost a home game that mattered, i.e. a non-friendly, in something like 40 years. But part of it was that they didn’t have their best player or best defender (and captain). And David Luiz.
The most recent Super Bowl has to be on the list, considering how things were at halftime.
If we did include whole seasons, nothing tops Leicester City.
Not a full court, or even half court shot, but Ralph Sampson’s weird looking volleyball style shot that beat the LA Lakers in the closing seconds of game 5 propelled the Houston Rockets to the 1986 NBA Finals. Which they then lost.
Eliminating the Lakers that year, that shocked quite a lot of NBA fans/players/sports writers/etc… Everyone just “knew” it was going to be another Lakers/Celtics Finals that season. (Sure, no Kareem, Magic, or Worthy in the Finals, but watching the Twin Towers, Robert Reid, Mitch Wiggins, and Jim Peterson go up against Bird, McHale, Ainge, and Parish et al was pretty good basketball.)
Just like everyone “knew” that Cam Newton was going to be a Superbowl superstar. Then, the Broncos D turned him into a shell shocked whiner.
I saw that Oilers game. Stupid Oilers. In this personal list of 3, that game really stands out. I came back to Houston from Denver for a visit and attended a big watch party near my brother’s place. Angry sports drunks do not fill me with security while in an Elway jersey and watching Moon get eclipsed.
[QUOTE=AncientHumanoid;20031535Just like everyone “knew” that Cam Newton was going to be a Superbowl superstar. Then, the Broncos D turned him into a shell shocked whiner.[/quote]
While I greatly enjoyed that game, I think it’s way off base to think “everyone knew” about Cam Newton. He had feasted on porous defenses, and by no means was considered a superstar about to have his coming out party.
Maybe not listening to or reading the same places. My thoughts were like yours, and I got a little tired of people ramping him up as tho Denver didn’t even belong (because of subpar QB play). IMHO, people who really knew football thought like us. I do remember, tho, talk of just how many rings Cam would end up with, starting with that one.
YMMV… as usual
It was shocking; that’s the thread title. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. But it was shocking.
As for the “one-off games” - why aren’t those shocking? Suppose a no-name fighter, who has never boxed before in his life, steps into a ring and knocks out Manny Pacquiao in a boxing round. That would be a one-off game, but it would be shocking.
then I think we are using very different definitions of “shocking”
they can be…who said otherwise?
It certainly would be and it would jump straight to the top of any list I’m sure but no-one one has put forward anything that is shocking to that degree.
No, I don’t buy that at all. By this rationale you may as well say that when you get to the last two minutes of the Brazil - Germany game it is no longer a shock either as you know what the result is going to be.
By its nature football throws up surprising results on a fairly regular basis. the above 1-7 is certainly one of them.
There is a team in the FA cup quarter finals right now who were 81 places below their last round opponents, They are in the fifth level of football and no-one from that position has gone this far in this competition for 100+ years. Their next opponents are Arsenal who are very near the top of the Premier League .
Now if Lincoln beat them that will be a shock but it will still not be as shocking as Leicester winning the league overall and the bookies would agree.
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And the SA team were atrocious and couldn’t defend. Really not all that shocking
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[QUOTE=Novelty Bobble]
a one-off game and SA are pretty poor
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These days yes. But this was a KSA team which had won 3/5 AFC Tournaments and been in the final in all five and had gotten to the second round in 1994. The fact that they were this bad in that game was surprising.
Saudi Soccer has basically not recovered from that, which is a pity since they did have good moments
Anybody who was shocked by this one clearly had never paid much attention to the Giants.
Back when I was still a football fan, I rooted for the Redskins. We played the Giants twice each year. They were the tar baby of NFL teams. Even when the Redskins were having a Super Bowl season, and the Giants were mediocre, the Giants were always a tough team to beat. They’d play up to your level or bring you down to theirs.
Sure, their win was an upset, but shocking? Hardly.
Now, when the Jets beat the Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl, that was a shock. Hardly anyone outside the Jets’ locker room saw that coming.
Rulon Gardner beating Alexsandr Karelin for the gold in Greco-Roman wrestling in 2000.
Regards,
Shodan
I think USA-Russia Lake Placid would qualify. It’s like a college team beating the Pats in the Super Bowl.
Or for that matter the Patriots, who had a wonderful, wonderful season but for all that they were undefeated were NOT as dominant a team in the latter half of the year as they were in the first. In their first eight games, the CLOSEST game was a 34-17 snoozer over Cleveland; every other game they won by at least 21 points. They were simply destroying the NFL.
The the second half there were a lot of close games, including the very last one, a 38-35 nailbiter over… well whaddya know. The New York Giants. Their playoff games prior to the Super Bowl were also not massacres. They were a great, great team, but by no means invincible.
[QUOTE=pulykamell]
I think USA-Russia Lake Placid would qualify. It’s like a college team beating the Pats in the Super Bowl
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I’d agree the Miracle on Ice is a much bigger shocker than most games mentioned here but it wasn’t that level of a shock. A college football would never, ever, ever beat the Patriots. Not if you played that game a thousand times. The USA hockey team wasn’t nearly that bad an underdog, because the nature of hockey lends itself to upsets. If you have a good goalie, and the other team’s goalie does not have a great night, an inferior team can win any given day. And the U.S. team were not incapable idiots; there were some extremely fine hockey players on that team, were well coached and wonderfully conditioned, and they had played outstanding hockey the entire Olympics.
The famous Herb Brooks like “If we played them ten times they might beat us nine, but not tonight” is pretty accurate, to be honest. 9-to-1 is a fair assessment of the odds. That night was the 1 instead of the 9; Jim Craig had a great game and the Russians gave up goals that they just shouldn’t have, but that happens to the best teams in the world some nights.
I was at that game. 
It wasn’t just the final scoreline in the Brazil-Germany match. It was the way they got there. 5-0 after 29 minutes. Four goals in 6 minutes, between minutes 23-29. A World Cup semifinal between two monster sides, one team on home turf, and this! I’ve never witnessed such defensive disarray, ineptitude, and half-assedness in my life. It just isn’t the kind of play you normally see at this level. Toni Kroos’ two consecutive carbon-copy goals within about 58 seconds were absurd, and I still laugh every time I see a replay of goal #6. Philipp Lahm receives a pass right in the middle of the penalty box and there’s no one within a 5-yard radius of him because all the Brazilians are just standing there watching! He was able to stop and set the cross like a billiard shot. Totally ridiculous.
HSV comes to the Allianz Arena every year and habitually loses to Bayern by scores like 9-2 and 8-0 (this past weekend) but still manages to look less stupid than Brazil did in a WC semifinal.
That was the first thing that popped into my head when I read the thread title. The second was Tiger Woods winning the 1997 Masters by 12 shots.
Since a tournament takes four days, and a round takes four hours, obviously it was clear that Tiger would win by a lot long before it was over, so it wasn’t a shock when he officially won. And going into that week, Tiger was playing really well, so it wouldn’t have been a shock that he won to someone who fell asleep on Wednesday and woke up on Sunday.
But to win by 12? You could have gotten 1000-1 on that in any sports book.