A look back at the Year of the Underdogs

With less than a week before 2016 becomes 2017, let’s take the time to look back at what has been, without a doubt, the ‘Year of the Underdogs’.

2016 will go down as a year in which Leicester City won the EPL title after starting the season as 5,000-1 outsiders. Two long droughts of at least 50 years each were broken in the AFL and NRL, while we saw two new world number ones in both men’s and women’s tennis.

There were some massive upsets at the Olympics, including a Singaporean upstaging Michael Phelps in the swimming pool to win his country’s first gold medal and a little known Australian from Sydney’s south-west claiming one of the most enduring events of the Games, the pentathlon.

But that’s not all – the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series in over 100 years, while Ireland pulled off a stunning upset over the All Blacks during the recent Spring Tour.

We start in the tennis, where Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams started the year as the world number ones in men’s and women’s respectively, only for them to drop to second by season’s end, while we also saw two new Grand Slam champions in the women’s division.

Djokovic started the season well enough, retaining his Australian Open title and finally breaking through for his maiden French Open title in June, both victories coming at the expense of Andy Murray.

The Serb’s victory at Roland Garros saw him not only complete his set of Grand Slam titles, but also saw him become the first man since Rod Laver in 1969 to hold all four major titles simultaneously.

After his triumph in Paris, Djokovic increased his lead over Murray in the rankings to over 8,000 points, and at this point appeared unstoppable has he had been for the previous 18 months.

But the 29-year-old would implode in the second half of the season, crashing out of Wimbledon in only the third round and also dropping his first match at the Rio Olympics, losing to eventual Silver Medallist Juan Martin del Potro.

He would bounce back to reach the final of the US Open, but Stan Wawrinka would prevent him from winning a third title at Flushing Meadows by way of a four-set win.

Then, in Paris, the very city where Djokovic had completed his Career Grand Slam, the Serb surrendered his number one ranking to Andy Murray after he failed to reach the final.

So how did Murray, somehow, overhaul his same-age rival and friend in the rankings?

Though they were on opposite sides of the draw at Wimbledon, Djokovic’s early exit saw the Scot become the new favourite for the title. Other than a five-set hiccup against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the quarter-finals, would win six of his seven matches in straight sets to march to his second title at the All England Club.

He then became the first man or woman in tennis history to defend his Olympic gold medal, doing so after he defeated Djokovic’s first-round conqueror, Juan Martin del Potro, in the final.

After a quarter-final loss to Kei Nishikori at the US Open, Murray would claim titles in Beijing, Shanghai and Vienna, to close to within 1,000 points of Djokovic in the rankings.

The race for the world number one ranking would then be decided in the final month of the season, with Murray a chance to overtake Djokovic if he reached the final at the Paris Masters and his Serbian rival failed to do so.

Djokovic lost in the quarter-finals to Marin Cilic, meaning Murray simply had to make the final to claim the world number one ranking for the first time. His job was made easier when his victim in the Wimbledon final, Milos Raonic, withdrew prior to their semi-final match due to injury.

Murray then celebrated his ascent to top spot by beating John Isner in the final.

Following a week’s break, the battle for the year-end world number one ranking would resume at the World Tour Finals in London, with both Djokovic and Murray a chance to finish the year on top of the rankings.

Both men went undefeated through the round robin stages, and after both won their respective semi-final stages, were to meet in the final. For the first time in history, one single match would decide who was to finish the year ranked number one.

Murray would defeat Djokovic in straight sets to win the season-finale for the first time, and thus finish the year ranked world number one. The fact he was even able to overtake Djokovic was quite amazing when you consider he trailed the Serb by more than 8,000 points in the rankings following the French Open.

The women’s side of things saw two new Grand Slam champions, as well as a new world number one by season’s end.

Serena Williams started the year on top of the rankings, and arrived Down Under as the defending champion and with a chance to win her 22nd Grand Slam title, pulling her equal with German great Steffi Graf.

But it would be another German, Angelique Kerber, who would play the match of her life to upset the American in the final of the Australian Open by way of a three-set victory and leave Williams on 21 major titles.

The 28-year-old had been down match point in her first round match against Japan’s Misaki Doi.

Williams also entered the French Open as the defending champion and the favourite, but would again go down in the championship match, this time to Spain’s Garbine Muguruza in straight sets.

The Spaniard had upset Williams in the second round of the same tournament in 2014 and it seemed only appropriate at the time that her ascent up the rankings culminated with a repeat dose on the American in the final.

Order appeared to be restored at Wimbledon, with Williams winning her seventh title by avenging her Australian Open defeat to Angelique Kerber with a straight-sets thrashing of the German in the final.

That brought her a 22nd major title, seeing her equal with Steffi Graf on as many titles and only two short of the all-time record of 24, held by Margaret Court.

But the American would finish the season poorly, losing in the third round of the Olympics and then surrendering the world number one ranking by losing to Karolina Pliskova in the semi-finals at the US Open.

Kerber’s eventual triumph in New York would see the German replace Williams at the top of the world rankings.

The 28-year-old would then be guaranteed to finish the year as world number one after Williams withdrew from the season-ending WTA Finals in Singapore.

Kerber would reach the final, only to lose to a resurgent Dominika Cibulkova (who had been as low as 66th in the rankings in February) in straight sets.

That was the tennis season in review.

We now move on to the AFL, with everyone asking at the start of the season whether Hawthorn could become just the second club after Collingwood in 1927-30 to win four premierships in a row, or whether they could be stopped.

The Hawks started the season as premiership favourites but despite finishing in the top four for the sixth consecutive year, they showed some inconsistent form throughout the season.

They won three consecutive matches by three points before being thrashed by 75 points by the GWS Giants in Round 6; many viewed that as possibly the first signs that the Hawthorn era of dominance could be just about to end.

After finishing third at the end of 23 rounds courtesy of a one-point win over Collingwood, Hawthorn would lose its qualifying final to the Geelong Cats after Isaac Smith missed a set shot at goal after the final siren.

They then lost their semi-final to the Western Bulldogs by 23 points, thus exiting September in straight sets.

To this day, many Hawks fans will be wondering what could quite possibly have been had Smith nailed his shot at goal in the match against the Cats.

Instead, they missed out on the penultimate weekend of the season for the first time since 2011 as their conquerors, the Bulldogs, went on to defeat GWS in a classic preliminary final before upsetting the Sydney Swans in the grand final.

The Dogs’ win in their first grand final since 1961 ended a 62-year premiership drought, the longest of any club entering the 2016 season, and came amidst a horror injury toll and a turbulent past few years.

The club had seen coach Brendan McCartney, captain Ryan Griffen, Brownlow Medallist Adam Cooney and CEO Simon Garlick leave following a dismal 2014 season which ended with a six-point loss to the GWS Giants at Etihad Stadium.

The events of the off-season that followed saw the Bulldogs enter the 2015 season as wooden spoon favourites, but if anything, the club rejuvenated itself under new coach Luke Beveridge, another graduate of the Hawthorn coaching academy.

Against all odds, the club would finish sixth on the ladder and would lose its elimination final to the Adelaide Crows.

Twelve months later, the Bulldogs would overcome serious injuries to key players, including captain Robert Murphy and midfielder Mitch Wallis, to finish seventh on the ladder.

They would enter the finals series as underdogs, but would produce courageous performances to first upset the West Coast Eagles in Perth, then three-time reigning premiers Hawthorn back home in Melbourne before edging out the highly-fancied GWS Giants in Sydney to qualify for their first grand final since 1961.

That preliminary final was bound to produce a fairytale grand finalist anyway, as the Giants had won just one game in twenty-three rounds (against Melbourne in Round 19) three seasons earlier.

The fairytale would not end there, as they then defeated the minor premiers, the Sydney Swans, by 22 points to clinch its first premiership since 1954. With the win, they became the first team to win the flag from seventh place on the ladder.

The streets of Melbourne’s western suburbs were to explode into delirium following the club’s premiership win, and may inspire other long-suffering clubs such as Melbourne (whose most recent premiership came in 1964) and St Kilda (1966) to break through in the not-too-distant future.

The NRL would also witness a new premier team, with the Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks burying decades of embarrassment to claim its first premiership in its 50th year in the competition.

The club had been left on its knees as recently as 2014 following the supplements scandal which saw coach Shane Flanagan suspended for that season, and left the reputations of several players, including captain Paul Gallen, damaged.

But after hiring a new CEO in Lyall Gorman and gambling on former Dally M Medallist Ben Barba to rebuild their tarnished image, the club began its slow ascent back up to NRL credibility, reaching the semi-finals before being knocked out, rather embarrassingly, by eventual premiers the Cowboys by 39-0.

Twelve months later, however, they would turn the tables by ending that club’s premiership defence with a 32-20 victory in the preliminary final, that result sending the Sharks through to their first grand final since the 1997 Super League season.

Though they were more experienced than their opponents (with Gallen providing the bulk of that experience with 278 NRL games), the Melbourne Storm, they would start underdogs against a team seeking their third premiership title.

The Sharks would start strongly, leading 8-0 at half-time thanks to a try to Barba before being forced to withstand a fierce second half fightback from the Storm, which took the lead 12-8 with just over ten minutes to go.

Andrew Fifita scored under the posts to give the Sharks back the lead, which they would have to defend if their fairytale was to finally come true.

As it did the previous year, the decider would go down to the final seconds, with the Storm launching one final raid on the Sharks line. They were unable to land the killer blow, leaving the longest premiership drought to finally come to its end.

The Sharks had entered the competition in 1967 but would find success hard to come by. They finished last in two of their first three seasons but would reach two grand finals in 1973 and 1978, going down on both occasions to Manly.

As mentioned before, they also reached the decider in the 1997 Super League season, but the Brisbane Broncos would prove too good for them in the first rugby league grand final to be played outside of Sydney.

They stayed afloat throughout the noughties thanks to the leadership of Brett Kimmorley, a premiership-winning halfback with the Storm in 1999, but couldn’t find the right ingredients to win its maiden title.

That was until 2016, when Gallen led a team featuring Ben Barba, James Maloney, Andrew Fifita, Chris Heighington and Luke Lewis, among others, to its long-awaited first premiership, and deservedly so, given the turmoil it had endured in years past.

We now swing over to the English Premier League, where Leicester City had long been the whipping boys of the competition.

They started the 2015-16 season as 5,000-1 outsiders for the title, and were very nearly relegated to second division following the 2014-15 season. Their best finish in over a hundred years of existence had been an eighth-place finish in 2000.

However, they lost just three games all season and the biggest fairytale in English football history came true when Tottenham, needing to win their final three games to catch the Foxes, blew a 2-0 lead to draw 2-all with reigning champions Chelsea.

That followed the Foxes’ 1-all draw with Manchester United.

The victory had many descriptions, ranging from the “most unlikely triumph in the history of team sport” to “the biggest thing ever in football” to, in the words of former Fox Gary Lineker, “the biggest sporting shock of my lifetime”.

The year of the underdogs wasn’t over just yet.

In American baseball, the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series Championship in 108 years after coming from 3-1 down in the seven-game series to defeat the Cleveland Indians by 8-7 and ten innings in the deciding game.

In the words of Paul Sullivan, who was reporting on the match for the Chicago Tribune, “the most epic drought in sports history is over, and the Cubs are world champions”.

It was a case of third time lucky for the Cubs, after they had suffered heartbreaking defeats in 1969 and 2003. Their lack of success over the decades saw the birth of this catchphrase among Cubs fans: “just one before I die”.

It looked as if the drought would continue when they fell behind 3-1 in the seven-game series, before four consecutive wins, the last of which there was a 17-minute rain delay, delivered them the ultimate success after over a century.

The win was celebrated by hundreds of fans back home in Chicago, where it had ticked past midnight. Meanwhile, for the Cleveland fans, their side’s drought extended to 68 years, the Indians having not saluted since 1948.

We now move onto the Rio Olympics where, in the words of Channel Seven’s Hamish McLachlan, “nothing ever goes to script in sport”.

For the past couple of Olympiads, Michael Phelps proved to be the man to beat in the swimming pool; such was his dominance that he won eight gold medals in Beijing, one of them in a photo finish.

But he finally met his match when a 21-year-old from Singapore named Joseph Schooling beat him to the gold medal in the 100m butterfly, with a time of 50.39 seconds. Phelps tied for second with Chad le Clos and László Cseh on 51.14.

Still, Phelps will go down as one of the greatest Olympians of the 21st century, along with Usain Bolt. Between them, the pair won a whopping 32 Olympic gold medals across four Olympic Games (Bolt did not participate in Athens).

But as far as Olympic underdog stories go, nothing beats Chloe Esposito’s victory in the modern pentathlon, a sport in which Australia had never medalled.

The 25-year-old from Camden in Sydney’s south-west was running seventh and trailed the leader, Poland’s Oktawia Nowacka, entering the combined shooting/running stage of the event.

However, she would miss just one shot (out of five) in the shooting component before taking the lead in the running part to claim the most unexpected gold medal of them all, even by her own standards.

Her points tally of 1,372 also wound up being an Olympic record.

“I still can’t believe it. First person ever in Australia to win a medal in pentathlon, and I can’t describe it,” Esposito said afterwards.

That’s a look back at the Year of the Underdogs in all sports across the world.

Some other noteworthy mentions:
* In the Big Bash League, perennial strugglers the Sydney Thunder won their first title by defeating the Melbourne Stars in the final at the MCG. Prior to that, they’d finished no higher than seventh (out of eight teams), and had finished last in their first three seasons.
* Adelaide United finally won their first A-League title in 2016, at the expense of the Western Sydney Wanderers. They were winless after eight matches, but would lose just once more en route to winning their maiden title. They had previously lost two A-League grand finals, both against Melbourne Victory, in 2007 and 2009.
* In the rugby union in November, Ireland upset New Zealand 40-29 to not only end the All Blacks’ 18-match winning streak, but also beat the reigning world champions for the first time ever.
* Shane van Gisbergen became the first Kiwi to win the V8 Supercars Championship since 1991 when he finished on the podium in the first of the two Sydney 500 races in December. With the title already decided, he completed his breakthrough season with victory in the final ever race at Homebush.

If there are any more underdog stories of 2016 that you know that I may have missed, please feel free to post them in the comments below.