Football's weirdest stories: One team tries to score at both ends, the opposition tries to defend both ends!

Starting today, we will be bringing you some of the weirdest and craziest stories from the archives of football, stories that have stood the test of time simply by being utterly unusual.

The stage was the 1994 Caribbean Cup qualifiers. The date was January 27. Barbados and Grenada were the two teams for this extremely unusual match-up.

The match was unusual because of the scoring pattern and the circumstances surrounding the qualification of both teams. This was the state of the match:

a) Barbados needed to win by a margin of at least 2 goals to qualify for the Caribbean Cup.

b) In case of the teams being tied at the end of normal time, extra time would be used to decide the winner. In extra-time, the team scoring the Golden goal would get two goals instead of one – this was something that was decided by the organisers, and something that has never again been done in football.

Barbados quickly scored two goals to take a lead, but an 83rd minute goal by Grenada made things interesting.

As the game approached the 87th minute, Barbados were leading by 2-1. Since Barbados needed to win by a clear margin of two goals, and since there were only three minutes left on the clock, a cunning strategy was hatched by the Barbados goalkeeper Horace Stoute and defender Sealy.

The Barbados duo understood that if they wanted to stand a chance of winning the match and progress, they either had to score a goal in the next 3 minutes (which would make the score 3-1 and Barbados would progress), or they could take the match into extra-time by scoring an own goal (making it 2-2 and forcing the match into extra-time).

And that is precisely what happened. Sealy and Stoute combined to waste some time and score an own-goal, which tied the score at 2-2 with less than three minutes left to play.

By now, the Grenada players had caught on to what the opposition was doing, and they too hatched a strategy. Since Barbados had to win by a clear margin of two goals, it meant that if Grenada scored one more goal – at either end – they would still go through. It wouldn’t matter if Grenada won 3-2 or lost by the same margin; they would still qualify since Barbados did not win by a two-goal margin.

And what followed was utter chaos. Grenada players ended up running from end to end, trying to score at both ends. Meanwhile, the Barbados players were defending both goals, to stop Grenada from scoring at either end!

This kind of unusual situation is extremely rare in football, where there are no clear sides of the ground for either team, one team is trying to score at both ends and the other is trying to defend both ends! Simply astonishing!

Barbados, though, held on for the last few minutes, and the score at the end of normal time was 2-2. The match went into extra-time with two goals being awarded to the team that scored the Golden Goal. Barbados was that team, and courtesy a goal from Thorne, they won the match 4-2 in extra time and qualified for the Cup.

In a press conference after the game, Grenadian manager James Clarkson said:

“I feel cheated. The person who came up with these rules must be a candidate for a madhouse. The game should never be played with so many players running around the field confused. Our players did not even know which direction to attack: our goal or their goal. I have never seen this happen before. In football, you are supposed to score against the opponents to win, not for them”.

Unsurprisingly, this particular Golden goal rule was never used again in the Caribbean Cup.

Do you have a crazy football story to share? Let us know via comments.