Unlikely Heroes Who Stepped Up In The Finals

Here Are Some Of The Heroes Who Stepped Up In The Finals

The heroes in the biggest games are usually the most unlikely people

Here are the unlikely heroes in some major finals in the 21st century.
And of course, we begin with the most recent one, the 2023 UEFA Champions League final.
While we were all looking to Erling Haaland, Kevin De Bruyne, or even Bernardo Silva to create the magic, it was the defensive midfielder Rodri who rose up and won Man City their first-ever Champions League trophy.
He did it with a cleanly-struck shot from just inside the box in the 68th minute.
And not to forget that he also did his midfield duties excellently that night.
He was later named Man of the Match for that game and he thoroughly deserved it. It just makes you think, what if Pep Guardiola had started him in THAT game against Chelsea in 2021?

Speaking of THAT game, the hero was obviously Kai Havertz.
City were favorites going into the 2021 Champions League final, but it was Chelsea who came out as winners thanks to two left touches from Kai Havertz, a guy who was largely regarded as a flop since he joined at the beginning of that season.
Havertz doesn’t even have to do much more for the club, his name is already there in the history books, and it can never be erased.
Speaking of history books, Ilkay Gundogan will go down in history as only the second-ever captain of a Premier League club to lift the Premier League, Champions League, and FA Cup trophies in a single season.

He was a major player; the hero of the FA Cup final.
He didn’t just score, he scored two goals, the first being the fastest to ever be scored in an FA Cup final.
 The last time Manchester United won the FA Cup, there was another unlikely hero. His name? Jesse Lingard
The lad, who was just 23 at the time, didn’t even start the game.
He came on in the 90th minute, just in time for extra time, and scored the winner 10 minutes to the end of the game.
He had just come off the bench to score the goal that won him his first-ever trophy with his boyhood club.
This is the stuff of dreams!

But a young player coming off the bench to win a major trophy for their team reminds you of someone, doesn’t it? Of course, we’re talking about Mario Gotze, the undisputed hero of the 2014 World  Cup final.
In a game that had Lionel Messi, Sergio Aguero, Thomas Muller, Toni Kroos, Mesut Ozil, and Gonzalo Higuain, it was 22-year-old Mario Gotze who came off the bench and scored the only goal of the game in the 113th minute.
Germany had lost 3 of their last 4 World Cup finals, so this one meant a lot to them, and the hero was someone they would’ve never believed it was going to be at the beginning of the game.

And this is a very similar story to the 2016 Euro final.
That game had proper superstars, from Cristiano Ronaldo to Paul Pogba to Antoine Griezmann to Olivier Giroud to Ricardo Quaresma, but it was a Guinea-Bissau-born Swansea City striker Eder who came off the bench and won Portugal their first-ever major trophy with his bullet of a strike.
Cristiano Ronaldo may have scored hundreds of goals for the Portugal national team but that goal from Eder at Euro 2016 still remains the biggest and most important goal in the history of Portuguese football.

2016 was really a fairytale year because in the Europa League final that year, we saw a 29-year-old right-back Coke score two goals which gave Sevilla the win against Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool.
To be fair, he played as a right-winger that day but he was still not the person we expected 2 goals to come from in that game.
 Liverpool took the L in that game, but 3 years later, they found themselves on the winning side in an even bigger European final. And that day, they, too, had an unlikely hero  Divock Origi.
The Belgian striker was Liverpool’s unlikely hero throughout that entire tournament. He got 2 huge goals in the semi-final to help turn around a 3-goal deficit against Barcelona and secure a place in the final for Liverpool. Then in the final, he scored the settler just 3 minutes before the end of the game and won Liverpool their first Champions League trophy since 2005.

And in 2005, the Reds also had another unlikely hero.
But that time, it wasn’t a striker, it was their goalkeeper, Jerzy Dudek.
Yes, it was crazy that Liverpool came from 3 goals down to equalize and force a penalty shootout, but if they had not completed the job on penalties, there would have been nothing like the Miracle of Istanbul.
Dudek stepped up and did what had to be done by saving penalties from Andrea Pirlo and Andriy Shevchenko in the shootout to win Liverpool the game and the trophy. As per status and pedigree, Dudek was not even the best goalkeeper on the pitch that day, but he ended up being the hero of the game.

 we’ll wrap up this list with the 2022 World Cup final.
But who do you think was the Hero?
Was it Lionel Messi who scored a brace in the game and stepped up first for his country in the shootout and scored to help his team win the World Cup for the first time in 36 years?

Was it Kylian Mbappe who, despite being on the losing side, scored a hat-trick in a WorldCup final for the first time in 56 years and also stepped up and converted the first spot-kick for his team in the shootout?
Was it Emiliano Martinez who made a very huge save in the 123rd minute of the game to force extra time and still saved a penalty in the shootout while also using his mind games to distract the other French player who missed a penalty in the shootout?
Or was it Gonzalo Montiel, the 25-year-old right back who came off the bench in extra-time and went on to convert the crucial penalty which won Argentina their first World Cup since 1986?