This week’s roundup also features boxing at White Hart Lane, pizza-delivery scooter racing, bare-handed racket destruction and a pesky squirrel
1) There are own goals and there are spectacular own goals, the kind that would be goal of the month contenders if only they were at the right end of the pitch. Here’s Adrien Gulfo, from the Swiss team Pully Football, suddenly discovering his inner Marco van Basten when he least wants to. Northampton Town’s Mathias Doumbé said he “didn’t want to take any chances” when he put into his own net on the volley from 30 yards to score for Mansfield in a League Two match in 2013. It’s always worth tipping our hat to Everton’s Sandy Brown for that emphatic diving header in a Merseyside derby in 1969 of course – and to Crystal Palace defender Jeff Hopkins for sending Perry Suckling scrambling in a 4-3 thriller in October 1989. But perhaps the most dazzling in recent years was scored by Festus Baise, against Hong Kong side Sun Hei. He can’t perform a reverse scorpion volley and send the ball floating over his keeper’s head from 18 yards can he? Course he can.
2) Luka Pibernik wasn’t the first cyclist to celebrate winning a stage only to realise the race isn’t over before going on to finish as an also-ran. Here he is unwittingly making a show of himself when there were still 6.2km to go on stage five of the Giro D’Italia. The poor fellow finished 148th. Adam Toupalik made exactly the same mistake – albeit with some additional chest-beating – at the 2016 Cyclo-Cross World Championships. But perhaps the ultimate is this. After the hubris, comes the fall … and the humiliating limp to the line.
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