The nine men

Day -697. WorldCup2018

The end of the day and sleep beckons. I will drift off to sleep mulling over the post I had in my head today but didn't have time to do the research for and put together.

It was inspired by another interesting performance by my local team, Toronto FC, who last night lost to the San Jose Earthquakes, 2-1, to a winning goal scored by Simon Dawkins. But the loss isn't the story, nor is Simon Dawkins although it is kind of interesting. As a player who didn't quite make it beyond Spurs' youth team, he moved to the US and had a successful stint with San Jose. It was so successful that he returned to England for a loan spell with Aston Villa. That didn't quite work out but he then had two good seasons with Derby County. After Steve McClaren was fired he was out of favour and returned to San Jose. And in that time at Derby he became such an awesome player that he returned to San Jose with Designated Player status. Without going into the whole DP explanation, what it simply meant was that he could now earn a lot more money, not quite in the Beckham, Gerrard, Pirlo league, but more than the average American player.

The story behind the story was that Dawkins scored the winner when San Jose had already had two players sent off, one in the first half and one in the 53rd minute when the score was 1-1. So the 9 men not only defended for all that time, but they even found a way to break away and win the match against money-bags Toronto, the team that has made a habit of messing whole seasons up year after year.

So it got me thinking, going through my memory bank of World Cup matches: did this ever happen in a World Cup. There's been teams winning when they had one player sent off but two? Have two players ever been sent off in a World Cup match? Italy, I believe, had two sent off against Chile in that infamous battle in 1962. But in my time, I can't remember it happening. I will have to look into it.