For an hour, the 15,238 Almería fans in the Horse Power stadium might have wondered if the almighty was on their side after all. The man who had begun the night floodlit out on the field, collecting the final few shares he didn’t already own from the founder of the club, certainly did. Or so it goes. Almería had returned to primera for the first time since 2015, faced Real Madrid in their opening game, and proprietor and president Turki Al-Sheikh, the minister in charge of entertainment at the Saudi royal court, didn’t have much faith. Not in his footballers, at least. “I fear we’ll be beaten by a big score,” he said. “I ask the players to draw. If we win, it will be thanks to God.”
Which is one way to describe Largie Ramazani. Because now, five days later, Al-Sheikh was sitting alongside Florentino Pérez in a plush sofa a little out of place in a football stadium and watching the impossible happen below, like some act of divine intervention. Ramazani had scored and was flying through the air upside down, Almería were actually winning and the place was going wild, the scaffolding from the temporary stands rumbling under feet, the woman behind the goal hammering away at the cymbal she had brought, drumsticks crashing into copper.
