Record-breaking wins and remarkable runs

Record-breaking wins and remarkable runs
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Mammoth scorelines and lengthy sequences provide the theme for this week’s statistical review, with emphatic wins for Celtic and Marseille featuring alongside successful runs for Real Madrid and Rosenborg and a costly series of results at River Plate.
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days have now passed since Atletico Madrid last tasted victory in El Derbi Madrileño. Real’s comfortable 2-0 win on Sunday extended their unbeaten run in the fixture to 18 matches, while over a decade has now passed since Atletico’s last success in this once-unpredictable derby. Their latest defeat at the Bernabeu also served to exacerbate Los Colchoneros’ already-poor away record, with 20 league games on the road under Quique Sanchez Flores yielding just three wins. The consequence of such figures is that Atletico – who finished 49 points behind Real last season – are currently to be found languishing 12 points behind their great rivals following ten rounds.
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years after the club was founded, Aberdeen suffered the heaviest loss in their history on Saturday when they crashed 9-0 at Celtic Park. This thumping defeat, the biggest since the Scottish Premier League was formed in 1998, eclipsed the Dons’ worst previous result: an 8-0 drubbing, again at the hands of Celtic, in 1965. These two clubs do have a habit of breaking records: in 1937, they contested a Scottish Cup final at Hampden that was attended by 147,365, a figure that has never been surpassed anywhere in the world for a national final. One record that did not fall on Saturday, however, was Celtic’s biggest-ever win, which remains an 11-0 thrashing of Dundee in 1895. Nonetheless, this remarkable match – which included two hat-tricks, three penalties and a red card for each team - was only the Bhoys’ third 9-0 win, and their first in 47 years. The first of the three, in 1928, included eight goals from a single player - British football’s all-time leading scorer, Jimmy McGrory.
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matches without a win was the run which this week cost Angel Cappa his job as River Plate coach. The 64-year-old had been in charge for just 18 games, the shortest tenure of any River coach in the past decade bar Reinaldo Merlo, whose spell at the helm in 2005 encompassed just 15 matches. For Coppa, who acted as assistant to both Cesar Luis Menotti and Jorge Valdano during the 1980s and ‘90s, the end was hastened by a 1-0 defeat against All Boys at the weekend that kept Los Millonarios in the relegation play-off zone. River now face the challenge of claiming their first win in over two months on Tuesday, when they face fellow strugglers Boca Juniors in the latest instalment of El Superclasico.
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unanswered goals against MSK Zilina last Wednesday gave Marseille the biggest away win in the history of the UEFA Champions League. Prior to the French champions’ emphatic victory, the most resounding Champions League win achieved on the road was by a margin of 5-0, a result managed by six different clubs. Marseille, in fact, needed only one more goal to equal the biggest-ever Champions League scoreline: Liverpool’s 8-0 trouncing of Besiktas in 2007. Nonetheless, they were able to match the record scoreline for a French club away from home in Europe, set when Lens beat Luxembourg’s Avenir Beggen 7-0 in the UEFA Cup in September 1995. Andre-Pierre Gignac also became the first Frenchman since Sylvain Wiltord in 2005 to score a Champions League hat-trick and only the third Marseille player to achieve the feat, following in the footsteps of Franck Sauzee and Didier Drogba.
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defeats at the end of a 30-game season is the record that has seen Rosenborg create a little bit of history in Norway. Sunday’s 2-2 draw at home to Aalesunds on a snow-caked pitch maintained the Trondheim outfit’s lengthy unbeaten record, confirming them as the first team in Tippeligaen history to survive an entire campaign without tasting defeat. Yet although the Norwegian champions currently boast the longest such run in top-flight football, they could soon be surpassed by the newly-crowned kings of Tajikistan. The team in question, Istiqlol Dushanbe, who clinched their first-ever Tajik championship on Friday, are unbeaten in 28 matches and have four games of their domestic season left to play.