A Tale Of Two Teams

PICTURE THIS... You are on JEOPARDY! the popular American TV game-show. It's 'Final Jeopardy' and everything is on the line...

The answer is - - - 
Two Teams that:  are related,  taste defeat within the same day;  both to early strikes;  both coming after recent spectacular performances;  both to teams beginning with the letter A.

What is the question??? 

Who are Man U & Red Army?!

Yes. It was the worst of times and it was the worst of times. (No apologies to Dickens)   After putting in 7 goals in their last two games Man U could not get one past the Aston Villa goalkeeper and went down 0-1 to a 20th minute header. 

Red Army (RA) apparently does not love animals as they lost, ignominiously by 'time-out' when clearly losing, to the resolute Animal Lovers (AL) after spectacularly putting away the AL conquers of the week before, Chess Unlimited (CU).

As early as the 13th move RA, playing white, went a piece behind offering the 'book-play' 'Nd5', in a Sicilian Najdorf opening, to AL's 'exNd5' reply. From that point on RA's best strategy would've been to play for a probable draw; alas, RA is just not made up that way. Even when an opportunity presented RA with the option of re-gaining the piece with a Rook for Queen exchange at the mid-game tactical stage; it was out-voted. 

AL, black, maintained the piece advantage until the bitter end.        The results are now that CU has beaten AL; RA has beaten CU; AL has beaten RA. Everyone still has eyes on the prize.

If RA's wanted a 'grouse' on which to hang their battered self-esteem they could claim the stop-start nature of the game which only got on the way after the 3rd attempt. This due to site disruptions and bad ISP connections. The latter was in fact responsible for RA's ignominious 'time-out' (they were about to resign anyway :)  A few members of the RA team were disgruntled by these disruptions,  and they were not present at crucial times.

Congratulations to Animal Lovers for their gritty win, and to RA... to paraphrase the  "Invictus" poem :-

"In the fell clutch of circumstance
 We have not winced nor cried aloud.
 Under the bludgeonings of chance
 Our heads are bloody, but unbowed."

RA Team (at various times) were:

Catalyst_Kh (2607)  Maniaa (2325) aldums (2220)                                             nibir (2196)  VuduChile (2155)    iViking (2132)                                   TheMoonwalker (2105) EternalHope (2061)  Eiwob (2038)
sramanigs (1980)    marco2771 (1881)
jwhitesj (1762)    Manchero (1702)  LYCAN148 (1684)
kanoutis (1531)     Funandnice (1425)
Lucanove (1322)   NewCrater (1756)