The Rebound - Worldwide: Boozy refs, strange goals in Sweden and Harry Winks stares relegation in the face

Welcome once again to The Rebound: Worldwide, bringing together the biggest and strangest stories from around the footballing globe in a neat little digest for your reading delectation.

Let’s start this week in Italy, where the naturally superstitious Neapolitans have endured a few needless palpitations over the past week. You see, while Napoli seem home and hosed in Serie A, enjoying a 16-point lead at the top of the table with nine games left to go, there was the small matter of Victor Osimhen’s missing mask.

The Serie A top scorer lost his lucky mask – which he wears following a facial injury, but one that had healed. He was wearing it because he believed that it brought him good fortune. And then it went AWOL on international duty, Osimhen was immediately injured, and his club side promptly lost 4-0 to AC Milan. And when relegation-threatened Lecce equalised in the second half of their tie on Friday, more than a few might have been wondering whether the mask really did have magical properties… but Napoli managed to scrape a 2-1 win in the end, and the party planning can continue in Campania.

Meanwhile, the race for Champions League football remains incredibly hard to call, but Lazio’s 2-1 victory over Juventus may have settled a few bets. Goals from Sergej Milinkovic-Savic and Mattia Zaccagni mean that Lazio now have a seven-point buffer over fifth-placed Inter Milan, while Juve now find themselves eight points shy of AC Milan in fourth. On a weekend when the two Milan teams could only manage draws against Salernitana and Empoli respectively, it was good news for Roma, who beat Torino 1-0 to go third, and rather worse news for Atalanta, who failed to take advantage of their rivals’ slip-ups, losing 2-0 at home to Bologna and leaving themselves in sixth.

The worst news of the weekend, however, was reserved for Sampdoria. The Serie A staples, home of Gianluca Vialli, Roberto Mancini, David Platt and now Harry Winks, are almost a certainty for relegation following a crushing 3-2 home defeat to an equally embattled Cremonese. Sampdoria will somehow need to make up 11 points in the remaining matches, or they’ll be in the second tier next season – and with local rivals Genoa among the favourites to come the other way, it could be a pretty miserable summer for the blue half of the city.

Meanwhile, over in Germany, there are seven games remaining and Borussia Dortmund’s 2-1 win over Union Berlin has likely whittled the title race down to two, while Bayern Munich remain top following a 1-0 defeat of Freiburg – a measure of revenge for Thomas Tuchel after the German giants were one of the victims of a brutal midweek winnowing in the DFB Pokal, which saw all of the Bundesliga’s top three knocked out in the quarter-final stage, with Freiburg into the semis at Bayern’s expense.

Managerless VfB Stuttgart will also be in the semi-finals after a good week which also saw them beat VfL Bochum away from home, a win which lifted the visitors out of the bottom two and leaves Schalke and Hertha Berlin as the teams most likely to endure the drop. At the other end of the table, RB Leipzig – another team into the last four of the cup – got their European campaign back on track at Hertha’s expense, and now sit fourth in the table, one point up on Freiburg. Another tense race at both ends of the table is on the cards.

Speaking of tight races, over to Spain, where the title will be heading to Barcelona but where the relegation race remains incredibly intense and the battle for top four is starting to simmer again after Villarreal’s 3-2 win at the Bernabeu helped them keep pace with Real Sociedad, who are currently set to join Barca and Madrid’s big two at the top continental table next year. Sociedad still have a four point cushion after a regulation 2-0 win over Getafe, but the Yellow Submarine have been on strong form of late and have been gradually closing a once-comfortable gap.

At the bad business end of La Liga, it was bad news once again for Valencia, who suffered a brutal blow in their battle to avoid relegation when they lost 2-1 away to fellow strugglers Almeria. With Espanyol losing once more, that leaves two of Spain’s most storied sides as the most likely candidates to join Elche in La Segunda next campaign. Sevilla, meanwhile, who have been firmly embroiled in the relegation scrap for most of the season, managed a draw with Celta Vigo that gives them a five-point buffer over Valencia and edges them ever so slightly closer to mid-table safety.

For our last stop before we get to an especially strange series of quickfire snapshots, let’s check in with Brazil, where the state championships came to a conclusion over the weekend. In the Campeonato Paulista, Palmeiras overcame a 2-1 first-leg deficit to thrash Agua Santa 4-0, with Endrick scoring the third as the sixteen year-old superstarlet continued to put his goal drought behind him.

And in the Carioca, Fluminense earned a second straight regional title after a thrilling 4-3 aggregate win over Rio rivals Flamengo, an absolute ding-dong affair that could have gone either way but was helped in the direction of the Tricolor thanks to this rather nifty strike from a certain Marcelo:

Snapshots

Regular readers may have come across our article from last week about referees, which referenced the Greek prime minister making a sporting intervention to demand overseas referees come in and help officiate the closing stages of the Super League season. The article concluded that bringing foreign referees in is unlikely to be the answer anywhere in the world, and that thesis was given some further evidential support when Polish whistler Pawel Raczkowski and his assistants were allegedly involved in a drunken brawl in Athens airport.

The Poles, who “categorically” deny reports that they were intoxicated, suggest that it was in fact Panathinaikos fans who started the altercation, but whatever the truth of the matter they were stood down from their expected duties in the match between AEK and Aris. An edifying affair all round, I’m sure we can agree.

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On a slightly lighter note, this week’s commendation for good humour goes to Dutch side FC Den Bosch, who recently found themselves on the receiving end of a 13-0 planking from PEC Zwolle in the Eerste Divisie, the second tier in the Netherlands. The club decided to mark the occasion by sending the hundred or so travelling fans in attendance a keyring bearing the motif “We were sh*t but I was there”. If you’re going to be rubbish, at least be rubbish in style.

Speaking of being rubbish, here’s an intriguing goal from the Swedish Allsvenskan where BK Hacken defeated Hammarby 3-1 thanks to a Benie Traore hat-trick. The first of the Ivorian winger’s strikes was probably the easiest he’ll ever score after Hammarby ‘keeper Oliver Dovin endured a rare instance of a human being buffering in the middle of a football match:

And lastly this week, a very Easter-friendly little story from Lithuania, where the Lyga A replaced the traditional pre-match coin toss with a seasonally-appropriate game of egg tapping. The captains each held a hard-boiled egg, bumped their hands together, and whichever egg cracked, lost. More of this sort of thing, please.