For those of us who are partial to the comedic side of football, October 16 was a historic day. At Elland Road, a power outage in the third minute of play caused a 40-minute delay in play. This, however, paled in comparison to the events on show at the MKM Stadium, where Hull City vs Birmingham couldn’t kick off due to the goalposts being two inches too tall. The match was delayed for just under half an hour as fans waited for grounds staff to saw the goals back down to the correct size and for goal line technology to be recalibrated.
Birmingham seemingly reacted better to the delay, comfortably winning 0-2 with goals from Troy Deeney and Juninho Bacuna on either side of the break.
While stadium power outages are relatively common throughout sporting history, most notably occurring ahead of the 2013 Superbowl in San Francisco and a friendly between Argentina and Brazil in 2012, incorrectly sized goalposts are far rarer.
A similar mistake was made in 2020 when Tottenham Hotspur faced off against North Macedonia’s KF Shkendija in the Europa Conference League. Spurs’ manager Jose Mourinho alleged that the Ecolog Arena’s goals were 5cm too short, posting a photo of himself touching the crossbar on his Instagram and joking that “I thought I had grown.” UEFA delegates were called in to switch out the goals, but this backfired on Spurs when Shkendija’s Valmir Nafiu scored off the woodwork just after halftime.