Super 'Stunday': Making sense of the night where not much made sense

Sport is supposed to make sense, you know? Most nights, sport is an unwavering, unflinching meritocracy. But, every once in a while, you really need help understanding it. How, for example, does one explain Aston Villa ― that escaped relegation by a hair’s breadth last season, courtesy a draw against West Ham United on the last matchday ― pumping in seven goals past Liverpool , that finished on top of the league just two months ago with 99 points, and the stingiest defence among all 20 teams? “Explain? I’m not sure (I can). But I can tell you what I saw,” Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp told Sky Sports as he tried to process what he had just seen from his title-winning team. “All the things you should not do in a football game, we did tonight. But Aston Villa forced us to do that. We did everything wrong.” Klopp’s side was not the only team to find itself seeking answers on Sunday. At the Theatre of Dreams, Jose Mourinho, the man who Manchester United had sacked, engineered a 6-1 victory over the Red Devils with his new club, Tottenham Hotspur. It was such a strange night, across leagues, and even sports, that even Bayern Munich found themselves needing an injury-time goal to beat mid-table Hertha Berlin in the Bundesliga; heavy favourite Eliud Kipchoge , the only man to have run a marathon distance under two hours (albeit in an unofficial race ), finished eighth at the London Marathon , losing over 42 kilometres for the first time since 2013; heavy underdogs Miami Heat powered to victory over the LeBron James-led Los Angeles Lakers in Game 3 of the NBA Finals after two defeats; and a bunch of seeded players including Simona Halep and Alexander Zverev were shown the door at the French Open by unheralded teenagers. [caption id=“attachment_8828551” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Miami Heat, who won Game 3 of the NBA Finals, were trailing 0-2 against the Lakers. AP Photo[/caption] Before Sunday, sport used to be about cold logic. A squad assembled with as much money as United have thrown on transfers in the past few years should not be capitulating so completely. A team like Heat, missing two starters in Goran Dragic and Bam Adebayo due to injuries, should not be beating the Lakers by double-digit scores! A man like Kipchoge, whose timings hover around the 2:01 mark in marathon after marathon, should not be getting beaten in a race by Kitata, whose personal best is 2:04:49, achieved two years ago! Top-seeded Halep, on a hot streak of 17 wins, should not be rolled over by Iga Swiatek in straight sets . Fifth seed Kiki Bertens should not be sent packing in straight sets by Martina Trevisan ― a qualifier ranked 159 in the world who had never won a match in the main draw of a Grand Slam before this French Open. Zverev, who was the runner-up at the US Open just a few days back, should not lose to the World No 75. Some of the explanations we heard in the aftermath of these results were stranger than the results themselves. Kipchoge tried to say his ear got blocked after 25 kms which led to the defeat. Some explanations were more reasonable, but were cause for alarm. Zverev ― who has been criticised over the past few months after partying instead of quarantining after competing at the Adria Tour, where multiple players tested positive with COVID-19 ― said he was ‘completely sick, and couldn’t breathe’ properly. [caption id=“attachment_8881171” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Alexander Zverev leaves after losing to Jannik Sinner in the fourth round at the French Open. AP Photo[/caption] As an aside, Sunday night showed it had the true potential to be a bizarre, inexplicable affair. So bizarre, that even Mourinho found himself magnanimously resisting the lure to take a potshot at his successor or United, and Chennai Super Kings eked out a victory in the Indian Premier League in a game where a player from the opposing team is under the lens for scoring ‘too slowly’ for Twenty20. But to get back to the point, how does one explain this relentless march of Davids in the world of Goliaths? Sure, you can point at the lack of fans. But are elite athletes and teams so fragile to crack because of the absence of fans? Maybe you can explain it away by saying that these coronavirus-affected times test people in ways they have never been tested before. But shouldn’t that work both ways, for both the winner and the loser? How, then, does the underdog overcome massive odds? Perhaps only an underdog can help understand. “I never looked at my height as an advantage or a disadvantage,” Tyrone ‘Muggsy’ Bogues, the living epitome of the word underdog and a man whose career bears testament to the fact that not everything in sports can be explained by conventional logic, told Indian journalists India last week. The shortest player to ever play in the NBA at 5’3”, Bogues played for over a decade racking up 1,369 steals, 6,726 assists, and ― perhaps more impressively ― 39 blocks as a point guard, a position which required him to be the coach of a team on the court. One of those blocks came on the seven-foot Patrick Ewing, a big man in a ‘big man’s league’ as Bogues called it. “I just didn’t care about what anybody said or anybody thought, I just kept believing in myself. I just happen to be small, I knew how to run my team, I knew how to make the guys around me better.” A week back when most of the world was backing the Lakers to beat the Heat in the NBA Finals, he was one of the rare ones saying Erik Spoelstra’s team had a ‘fighting chance’. A fighting chance. Isn’t that what sport is about at the end of the day? The results may not make sense. And like Klopp, you may not be able to explain everything that happened on Sunday, but in that inexplicable and unpredictable ― yet reassuring ― window of uncertainty lies the true meaning of sport.