Turn of events as football giants surprised in Qatar

This year’s FIFA World Cup is turning out to being a surprise package. Football giants have met their full dose of disappointments.

Many fans had many of their predictions right, but the truth is that gamblers have been left reeling from shocks after shocks due to unusual manner under which great football giants were swept under the carpet. Although some teams have successfully secured their places in the knockout stages, it didn’t come without a cost they had to incur. First it was the great Argentina, who woke up to a shocking 2-1 defeat to underdogs Saudi Arabia in their opening match.

Any one who placed his bet on that game – I am sure – didn’t give a second thought to any remote chance of Saudi Arabia beating the South American football giants. But as they’d say in football fields, ‘football is 90’ – meaning that it’s only after 90 minutes that we will who has won. This football adage simply debunks the ‘big boys’ syndrome where there are traditional teams that are ever associated with winning against ‘others’.

The same fate followed the highly rated 2014 winners, ‘The German Machine’. Like the Argentina versus Saudi Arabia results, no one would have anticipated a Japan win against Germany. But at the end of the proverbial 90+ minutes, the ‘Machine’ was reduced to a mere tool when Samurai Blue pulled the unexpected 2-1 humiliation of football giants like Germany.

Seeded in one group with 2010 winners Spain, Japanese didn’t end there. There was still another upset under their sleeves. In their final game against the Spaniards, the same fate that met Germany is the same that Japan inflicted on Spain. It was a bitter 2-1 defeat on Spain to halt their group stage winning streak.

Another surprise defeat still greeted the footballing world when, in their last game of the group, Cameroon’s Indomitable Lions bid Qatar World Cup goodbye in style. The Rigobert Song-coached side surprised another football giants in the name of Brazil with a painful one goal at the tail end of the game.

Although these surprises didn’t affect all these football giants advancement into the next round, a team like Germany was given marching orders in group stage – a replica of what they went through in the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.