Coaching?!?! You mean it has rules? When did that happen, and why did they ruin it with rules?
Although it’s probably not up there, I feel I should mention the FA Cup fourth round (I think) replay last season between Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City. The match at City had ended 1-1, so the replay was played at Tottenham. At half time, they were winning 3-0, and Manchester City had just had a player sent off.
At this point, I took the opportunity to go to a betting website to see what the odds on City were, and maybe have a flutter. The website was unavailable - still, saved me wasting my money, surely?
In the second half the ten-man team came back to win 4-3, overturning odds that (I later heard) had been quoted at 200-1, 250-1 and similar. As a supporter I was overjoyed… as someone who nearly but a fiver on, I was distraught. :smack:
Still, I was pleased to hear that someone had put about 1000GBP on Tottenham for a possible return of a few pounds thinking it was a dead cert 
More likely, the display is limited to 99-1, but the odds can be higher. It’s just very rare for a horse with odds that high to win, but I seem to recall some win payouts of more than $200. And, of course, exotic wagering can pay over $1000 for a $2 bet.
I’m sorry if cricket is a bit tricky to understand, but I can assure you that the situation half-way through the match was massively favourable to the Australians.
Basically in international cricket, each team has 2 innings (I think a team has 9 in baseball). They score ‘runs’ (typically somewhere between 100 and 500) until ten players (there are eleven in all in a cricket team) have been given out by the umpire.
If a team is way behind (250 runs in international cricket), they can be forced to have their two innings consecutively (this is called ‘following on’). This is a big advantage, because the other team will know precisely what they need to do to win.
So England were way behind after one inning each, and were forced to take their second innings.
Thanks to two magnificent individual performances, England turned the match around.
Ian Botham scored a** lot ** of runs (the rough equivalent a man hitting a couple of home runs with bases loaded!), and Bob Willis stopped the Australians scoring runs (the rough equivalent of a pitcher getting a string of strikes).
I watched it live on TV (I am that old :eek: ), and it was an amzing atmosphere.
The bookies gave it as 500-1.
Ellis Dee:
I’ve got to disagree, there. Seriously, what would the odds have been for the Oilers game after they went up by 32 early in the 3rd? 150-1? 200-1? I’d think it’s closer to the second figure.
I’m not saying it’s the biggest upset ever, and it’s even possible that the hockey thing (hockey? what’s that?) was a bigger upset, though I doubt it. I don’t think it’s possible, however, for Lake Placid to have been a “much bigger upset.”
Oops, that last post was by me. Believe it or not, “Little Cloud” isn’t a big football fan.
If you are looking for a single event odds-before-the-game-starts type upsets, you need to be looking at two teams or individuals who would not normally play each other because they vastly different in terms of playing ability. International competitions can certainly create such occasions. An Example would be the qualifying matches to get to the football world cup finals. There you often get teams like the Faroe Islands (population 45 000) playing the big boys of world football. Another example would be the FA cup competition in the UK. In theory any team in the country can enter this competition, including a sunday afternoon pub team, for example. If they were lucky enough in the draws they could make it through to the 3rd round proper of this competition and face one of the top teams. Though not quite as extreme as a pub team, this year non league Exeter faced Manchester United in the 3rd round. Remarkably they achieved a draw, albeit against a largely reserve team Manchester United.
I started a new thread to tackle this question in its own thread.
I’m afraid I don’t understand this British usage. Is “Reserve Team” the equivalent of “second string” in the US? Which is to say, players who are normally on the bench because the better players or injured or whatever?
The only reason State had gotten into the NCAA was because they had won the ACC earlier. I still remember that alley-oop which ended the game.
Good times, good times.
Sort of, except more so: many of the players Manchester United fielded are not good enough to normally get on the bench. For example, they fielded some players from the youth team, many of whom will probably never make the grade.
Let me counter with this since we are talking about comebacks (although I feel we should be looking at the odds when a game/match starts):
1999 Ryder Cup
Sept. 26, 1999: United States 14½, Europe 13½
The American team staged the greatest comeback in Ryder Cup history, capped by Justin Leonard’s 45-foot birdie putt on the 17th hole to clinch the victory. The Americans won 8½ of 12 points in Sunday singles at The Country Club in Bookline, Mass. to reclaim the Cup they had lost at Valderrama two years earlier.
You are comparing two pro teams here. The Miracle on Ice was a group of American college kids (average age was about 22 ) versus pro Russian players (mostly stars from Army, Dynamo, and Wings). As noted before, the Russians were destroying the European teams, OUR NHL All-Star team (2 out of 3), and those same college boys in an exhibition game 2 weeks earlier, 10-3.
For the U.S. team, beating the Russians was like a high-school football team beating the Pittsburgh Steelers. - Bill Clement…ESPN (he played for the Atlanta Flames which beat the US Olympic Team, 3-0 earlier in the season)
Can The U.S. Steal Olympic Gold From The Russians? - an article by Dan Stoneking in The Complete Handbook of Pro Hockey: 1980 season, written half a year before the 1980 Olympics…read all 5 parts to get a perspective of the American’s chances BEFORE the game was played.
Two more:
Tyson / Douglas - 1990 - Tokyo Dome: 42-1
(Of course you can argue whether boxing is a sport, but I wouldn’t recommend doing so with a boxer)
In my neck of the woods, Belmont Thoroughbreds:
Belmont Stakes upsets since 1940
Sarava - 2002: 72-1
Sherluck - 1961: 66-1
Temperance Hill - 1980: 54-1
(Of course you can argue whether horse racing is a sport. I feel quite confident you’d be better arguing the point with a jokey as opposed to a Golden Gloves winner)
Foinavon won the 67 National at 100-1,mainly because he was so far behind he had time to stop and walk round the carnage ahead as there was a pile-up at one of the fences…
Just to briefly continue the cricket / confused 'merkins hijack:
Cricket explained for Americans BY AN AMERICAN. It’s quite good.
Readers might think “The Miracle On Ice” is a hyperbolic figure of speech referring to a certain hockey game. It’s not hyperbole. It is in every meaningful sense of the word an actual, proper miracle—something so outside the natural realm of physical phenomena as to preclude any interpretation but intervention by a being from outside the known universe.
See, these comparisons likening it to this pro team beating that pro team, or this or that high school or college team defeating this other team, are well intended to convey a sense of it, but they utterly fail, missing by light years. This is not some patriotic exaggeration. It is in no way an overstatement to say this was NO TEAM AT ALL beating the absolute best professional team that has ever been assembled, in hockey or perhaps any other sport, before or since. The Soviets had played together for years and operated as a well-oiled machine controlled by a single mind, calmly eviscerating teams of professional all-stars with the cold calculus and precision of an electronics assembly line. Not only had these college kids never played together as a team before, they variously did not know or openly hated one another, and despised their coach (by his own intention). This was approximately tantamount to the New York Yankees, holders of 26 World Series Championships, being beaten in baseball by nine cafeteria ladies from nine widely distributed public schools across the land, except that probably none of the ladies would have hated each other.
Even this does not adequately answer the OP, because there is no sensible expression of sports odds sufficient to convey how profoundly this victory should NOT have occurred. One might as well say “Infinity to the googolplex power to one.”
And then two nights later, no longer the underdogs, emotionally and physically exhausted, with the pressure on them multiplied a hundredfold, they beat the Finnish national team for the gold medal. Utterly inconceivable.
Does anyone know a way to find out what odds the bookies were offering on a USA victory before the match?
I did a search on horse race winners. There have been several 100-1 winners. There probably have been others at longer odds.
hyjyljyj writes:
> This was approximately tantamount to the New York Yankees, holders of 26
> World Series Championships, being beaten in baseball by nine cafeteria ladies
> from nine widely distributed public schools across the land, except that probably
> none of the ladies would have hated each other.
Now you’re just being ridiculous. The American team consisted of people who had played the game for years. They were the best players from the college hockey teams. They may have not liked each other or their coach, but then the Yankees frequently don’t like each other or their coach. The true comparison would be if the Yankees, after winning the World Series, were beaten by an all-star team of that year’s college baseball teams.
I wonder the same thing about the Chaminade/UVA basketball game.
I still think a basketball upset of this magnitude is more startling than any hockey upset. Hockey is a low-scoring game. As a consequence, it takes fewer fluke plays to make an upset happen. Moreover, basketball is a game where physical stature matters. A lot. Chaminade beat a team that was physically much more imposing.
How about the 1996 Monaco Grand Prix, which is probably one of the biggest upsets in the racing world, at least. The race was won by Olivier Panis driving a Ligier. To put that into perspective, Panis isn’t a great driver. He finished on the podium maybe half a dozen times in his entire career (he has been in F1 since '94 and this is his only win). Ligier were perpetual back-markers, basically rolling chicanes for the faster teams. And Monaco is the most prestigious race on the calendar, their Superbowl if you will, the one where everyone brings their A game.
Upsets this big just don’t happen in auto racing. In most team sports, it’s possible for one side to have an off day or bad luck. For this to happen in racing, every single other team has to have a bad race. That is exactly what happened. Of 22 starters, only 3 were running at the end.
Michael Schumacher started his Ferrari on the front row and was a strong favorite. The Williams cars were also strong and Damon Hill would be his biggest challenger (Hill and Williams would go on to win the driver’s and constructor’s championship that year). The two Benettons (note to those unfamiliar with F1: teams start 2 cars per race) were also very fast. Rounding out the top echelon were McLaren and Jordan.
The race was run in broken weather conditions. It had rained heavily that morning, but it had stopped and the track was starting to dry by race time. Hill took the lead off the starting line and Schumacher uncharacteristically crashed on the first lap. Hill comfortably led almost half the race and looked like he would walk away with it, but his engine blew up. After that the lead changed several times as each successive leader ran into problems and dropped out. In the end only Panis, a McLaren, and a Sauber were still running.
To be fair, Panis did drive extremely well that day. He started 14th on the grid, on a track where passing is extremely difficult on a good day, not to mention the tricky conditions it was run in then. He pressed the attack at times when most other drivers were just trying to nurse their positions. He would go on to finish in the points (top six) only twice more that year, never higher than 5th.