sporting moments i love

by Haider Toha · 9 July 2025

a running list of the matches and moments i find myself going back to, the ones that stuck with me long after the result stopped mattering.

football

messi's last-minute winner against iran, 2014 world cup. iran had frustrated argentina for ninety minutes and looked set to hold out for a draw, then messi took one touch twenty yards out and bent it into the far corner in stoppage time as if the previous hour and a half had just been him waiting. it is the most messi thing imaginable, a whole game settled in one second of something nobody else on the pitch could do.
tioté's equaliser in newcastle 4-4 arsenal, 2011. arsenal were four goals up at half time and newcastle somehow hauled the whole thing back, with cheick tioté smashing in the leveller near the end for the only goal he would ever score in his time at the club. it means a good deal more now that he died so suddenly in 2017 and it is still the wildest comeback i have watched in the league.
lincoln city knocking burnley out of the fa cup, 2017. a non-league side went to a premier league ground and won it with a header in the very last minute, becoming the first team from outside the league to reach the quarter-finals in over a century. i coach a kids team on saturdays and cup nights like this are exactly why i still tell them anyone can beat anyone.
stephanie roche's goal for peamount, 2013. she flicked the ball up over a defender and volleyed it in during a women's league game that nobody was really filming and it still finished runner-up for fifa's goal of the year, ahead of strikes scored at a world cup by full-time professionals. the best things in football do not always happen on the biggest stages and that is the whole reason this one stuck with me.

cricket

ben stokes at headingley, 2019 ashes. england were nine wickets down and still needed seventy-odd to win, with jack leach defending one end and barely able to lay bat on ball and stokes simply took the game off australia almost single-handedly with an unbeaten 135. i have watched a great deal of cricket and i am not sure i have ever seen one player drag a side somewhere it had no right to be quite like that.
kohli against pakistan at the mcg, 2022 t20 world cup. india were four down and the chase looked gone in front of ninety thousand people, then kohli pulled it out of nowhere, the two sixes off haris rauf the kind of shots you are not really allowed to play under that much pressure. india against pakistan is the most loaded fixture in the sport and he made the biggest version of it look like a quiet net.
misbah's twin hundreds and the 56-ball blast, abu dhabi 2014. misbah spent most of his career being teased as the most cautious batsman alive, then made a century in each innings against australia and brought the second one up in fifty-six balls, equalling what was then the fastest test hundred ever scored. watching the most patient man in the game suddenly cut loose like that was a treat reserved for people who actually sit through test cricket.
ashton agar's 98 from number eleven on debut, 2013 ashes. a nineteen-year-old walked out last with australia in deep trouble and very nearly made a hundred batting at number eleven, which had never once been done, before falling two short in a stand that set records of its own. it is one of the great near-misses the game has produced and i still feel quietly robbed on his behalf whenever it comes up.

tennis

murray winning wimbledon, 2013. britain had waited seventy-seven years for a man to win the title and murray finally did it in straight sets against djokovic, on a baking sunday with the whole country watching through its fingers. living here, you could feel how much it mattered and the closing game alone, three championship points come and gone before he got over the line, was almost too much to sit through.
raducanu winning the us open as a qualifier, 2021. an eighteen-year-old came through three rounds of qualifying and then took the whole tournament without dropping a single set, something that had simply never been done. for about a fortnight a british teenager nobody outside the sport had heard of looked completely untouchable and then it was over almost as suddenly as it had begun.
federer against del potro at the london olympics, 2012. their semi-final ran to 19-17 in a deciding set with no tiebreak, four and a half hours of two of the most-liked players in the sport refusing to blink, on the same grass wimbledon is played on. i have always been in federer's corner and it is probably the finest match of its type that nobody mentions, purely because it happened to be a semi-final and not a slam final.
razzano knocking serena out of the french open, 2012. a player ranked outside the top hundred beat serena williams in the opening round and saved seven match points doing it, the only time serena ever lost in the first round of a major. razzano had lost her fiancé to a brain tumour the year before and serena was so shaken by the defeat that she went out and hired the coach who built the most dominant stretch of her whole career.

f1

verstappen's wet drive at brazil, 2016. the track was barely drivable and half the field was spinning into the barriers and a teenage verstappen dropped to sixteenth late on before carving his way back to third passing what felt like a car a lap. hamilton won the race but nobody really talks about that, because the whole afternoon belonged to the kid making everyone else in the wet look like they were still learning.
räikkönen's "leave me alone" win in abu dhabi, 2012. in his first year back after walking away from f1 to go rallying, räikkönen led most of the race and held alonso off for the win, then told his engineer over the radio to leave him alone because he knew what he was doing. the line is a meme now, but underneath it was a genuinely good drive and a proper comeback, which is very him.
webber going round the outside of alonso at eau rouge, spa 2011. he pulled alongside and simply kept his foot in through the fastest and most frightening corner on the calendar, taking the place somewhere almost nobody would even think to try it. it is a single overtake rather than a whole race, which is probably why it lives on as a clip fans pass around rather than something the casual viewer recalls.
kobayashi on the podium at his home race, suzuka 2012. he held button off to finish third in front of the japanese crowd, the first home driver to manage it there in over twenty years and, as things turned out, the last japanese driver to stand on an f1 podium at all. the scenes with the grandstands afterwards are the sort of thing this sport does better than almost any other.

some of these everyone remembers and some you would only really know if you follow the sport closely, which is how i think a list like this should read.