Zahawee claimed a 2:1 victory over Mosul in the Iraqi League's seventh round of matches on Saturday. The result lifts the hosts up the table while putting further pressure on their visitors from the capital.
It was Zahawee who broke the deadlock first. S. Temirov converted a penalty in the twelfth minute, and to be fair, the visitors had been rattled by sustained pressure up to that point. The away side never stopped trying to find a way to contain the hosts' early tempo.
Mosul responded before the interval. A. Attwan found the net in the forty-fifth minute plus one, and by then the match had turned into something rather more open than either manager might have planned for. It was a simple finish from close range, the sort of moment that tends to settle nerves rather than raise them.
The decisive blow fell in the fiftieth minute. A. Alsanati struck for Zahawee and here's the thing — we had tipped the home side to win, giving them forty-four percent confidence, and the match unfolded largely as we expected. The visitors had been running out of games to recover from this deficit, and this one would count among them.
Both sides picked up two bookings in the match, nothing more dramatic than that. Possession figures might tell you who controlled the ball, but the result was decided by those three moments rather than any sustained dominance.
Zahawee move up to ninth place on nine points from seven matches, while Mosul drop further down to twelfth with eight points. The gap between them widens to a point, and for the visitors the run of results since that three-nil defeat at Novruz suggests they are running out of margin for error.