adminLONDON. — At the start of the English football season last August, bookmakers in Britain were offering odds of 5 000-1 against Leicester City winning the Premier League title. 5 000-1? Now, let’s put that into perspective. The bookies offered odds 10 times more generous that the Loch Ness Monster would be discovered. Or more than twice as generous that Kim Kardashian would become US president. It was only 2 000-1 that Elvis would turn up alive and well.
Should Presley materialise now, what price he would be wearing the shirt of Leicester City, who were crowned champions on Monday night after Tottenham Hotspur failed to beat Chelsea?
For everybody has bought into the idea that, as Leicester’s most celebrated son, former England captain Gary Lineker, has suggested: “We could be celebrating the greatest sporting upset of all time.”
There are countless contenders for that accolade, from James “Buster” Douglas knocking out the seemingly invincible world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson in 1990 to a team of US soccer part-timers beating mighty England 1-0 at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil.
These, though, were very different sensations: one-off, one-day, never-to-be-repeated flashes in pans; shocks fashioned over a couple of hours that live in the memory for a lifetime.
Such as the time a lineup of American college students downed the professional and supposedly unbeatable Soviet hockey machine in the 1980 Olympic final, the fabled ‘Miracle on Ice’.
Every now and again these short, sharp shocks for the ages test our credulity. Last year the sports world gasped as the South African Springboks, eternal rugby powerhouses, were beaten by Japan’s rising sons in the World Cup.
The point about Leicester’s fairytale, though, is that it was fashioned not on one day nor even over one month of a tournament, like Denmark’s wholly unlikely European Championship victory in 1992 when they were drafted in as late substitutes. — Reuters.
Online Reporter