Great football from the magnificent Qarabağ A draw worth a victory

So, it has finally happened! For the first time in the history of our national football, an Azerbaijani club has shared points with a British team! And not with Sunderland or Brighton, but with Chelsea — a top-tier side worth over a billion euros!

When we said before this match that we were expecting another miracle from Qarabağ, many didn’t believe it. Yet, as the game showed, they were very wrong! Nothing inspires athletes more than the faith of their own supporters — and this is especially true for footballers!

I don’t think that in the next twenty years, at least, we’ll see any Azerbaijani club (except perhaps Qarabağ itself — no offence to the others) take points from an English top club again. And I don’t think that Chelsea, which just a few days ago looked down on Qarabağ and even left its superstar Cole Palmer at home, will forget this fiasco anytime soon — a fiasco they suffered even with Cucurella, Caicedo, and Garnacho in the lineup.

For the reigning FIFA Club World Cup champions, a draw against Qarabağ — whose entire squad costs about the same as Chelsea’s goalkeeper Robert Sánchez alone — is nothing short of a humiliation!

And yet, everything had started so well for the Londoners. As early as the 17th minute, they took the lead thanks to a sudden strike from the €60 million signing Estêvão — a shot that Qarabağ’s goalkeeper Kochalski clearly misjudged. But then… then it was almost a repeat of the “Lisbon miracle” — the comeback against Benfica! By the 39th minute, the scoreboard read 2–1: the Aghdam side not only equalised with a historic goal — the first ever scored by an Azerbaijani club against an English team — but went ahead through a coolly converted penalty by Janković.

After the break, there were legitimate fears that Qarabağ — who had faced Imishli before this match — might struggle to shift gears against the reigning Club World Cup champions and fail to sustain the tempo imposed by the English giants. However, even after substitute Garnacho levelled the score, the Aghdam players did not slow down — on the contrary, they forced Chelsea to drop their pace. Moreover, had Oleksiy Kashchuk been just a bit more precise at the end of the match, the “Lisbon fairy tale” would have surely been repeated — this time in Baku!

But last night in the Azerbaijani capital, Gurban Gurbanov’s men created not just a fairy tale, but a true miracle! A miracle that, I repeat, we believed in — and urged our readers to believe in with us! I am deeply grateful to Gurbanov’s team, at the very least, for not only performing yet another miracle, but also for proving that nothing in this world is impossible — especially in football! Don’t you agree, ladies and gentlemen?

By Vugar Vugarli, exclusively for Caliber.Az