There have been some amazing occurrences in soccer matches worldwide this week, so sit back and enjoy these highlights.
'Imperfect' hat trick
Michael Duberry couldn't stop scoring Saturday.
Luckily, the Oxford United defender's final goal of the day actually counted for his own team.
Duberry scored two own goals to give Hereford United the lead in a English League Two match, the second one in the 86th minute, but came up with a 90th-minute equalizer as Oxford pulled out a wild 2-2 draw.
In his first 19 seasons, the 36-year-old former Chelsea and Leeds United center back scored just seven goals in 362 appearances, but has three in 21 matches for Oxford.
Duberry had some fun with his performance on Twitter, calling it the "imperfect hat-trick – left foot (OG), header (OG) and right foot."
Two teammates, two yellow cards, but only one ball
Everyone who plays for Bury knows captain Steven Schumacher takes penalty kicks for the English League One side.
Apparently, everyone except Giles Coke, that is.
When Coke was taken down in the box in the 35th minute of Saturday's match against Yeovil Town, he tussled with Schumacher over who would step to the spot. Both players ended up being issued yellow cards in the bizarre sequence.
Schumacher and other teammates finally convinced Coke to back down, and Schumacher converted the penalty kick as Bury went on to a 3-2 win.
"Steven Schumacher is the captain, I've given him the responsibility to take penalties and as far as I'm concerned the rest of the team know that," Bury manager Richie Barker told BBC Radio Manchester.
The 12th man: Mother Nature
Every once in a while, you'll see a player score an "Olimpico" goal – bending the ball into the goal directly off a corner kick.
How about the same player doing it twice in one half?
Coleraine's Paul Owens did just that in a 3-1 win over visiting Glenavon in an Irish Premiership match Saturday, playing the gusty winds to perfection with his left-footed corner kicks in the second half.
Owens nearly had a third in similar fashion, but Glenavon goalkeeper David O'Hare tipped it over the crossbar.
From way downtown
This was just a friendly, but Cristian Villagra of Ukraine's FC Metalist had a free kick, saw a goalkeeper off his line and fired away.
From 70 yards out.
The Argentine left back's strike got just under the crossbar and over the leaping Dinamo Moscow keeper for an impressive goal.
Premier League popularity
More than a million people watched Manchester United's 2-1 win over Arsenal on Sunday morning on Fox, the first live telecast of a Premier League match on a major U.S. network – more than double the previous record for a broadcast on cable.
The game, which kicked off 10 a.m. Central, drew 1.3 million viewers.
ESPN's best audience for a live Premier League match is 528,000 viewers for another Manchester United-Arsenal game in December 2010, while Fox Soccer's high of 418,000 viewers came last February for a match between Chelsea and Liverpool.
Fox will show another live match on Sunday, Feb. 5, as Chelsea faces Manchester United.
- The game was shown on tape delay on Milwaukee's Fox 6, which didn't sit too well with former Chicago Fire general manager Peter Wilt, who wrote about it in his regular column for the Whitefish Bay Patch.
- Speaking of which, many Arsenal fans were frustrated by some of manager Arsene Wenger's decisions in the match and the team's status in general – the Gunners are in fifth place, well out of the title chase and looking at the possibility of a seventh consecutive season without a trophy. Included in that group, strangely enough, is the president of Rwanda. On his verified Twitter account, Paul Kagame posted several comments about Wenger. "When a good team (players) and a good coach fail for long, to deliver, one of them has to change, or even both!" he Tweeted.
