Waalwijk Topple PSV

What separates a cup night from a league afternoon? Not the quality of the football, necessarily, but the way a single evening can refuse to follow the script that reputations have written for it. On 2 November, RKC Waalwijk of the Keuken Kampioen Divisie beat PSV Eindhoven 2-1 in the Dutch Cup, and 7,508 people will not quickly forget it.

PSV, four times Eredivisie champions from 2054/55 to 2057/58 before that run ended, arrived as the side with the standing. They finished with fifteen shots to six and eleven corners to none, and their loan signing Ángel Lozano, on from Getafe, scored and drove them on all evening. Conner Lee assisted and probed. Yet the numbers that matter in a knockout tie are the ones on the board, and there PSV were always chasing.

RKC's goals came from Arne Aymadyar, who also made a chance before giving way on 61 minutes, and from a side built on Jhon Dieker's running and Radek Zima's composure at the back. Five of their starters were making first appearances in this company, among them the goalkeeper Mehdi Tahiri and the striker Rogier Drost, and none of them looked overawed by the occasion.

PSV changed shape and personnel as the night wore on, but the equaliser would not come. Cup football has always been kinder to the side that takes its chances than to the side that accumulates them, and that old truth held firm here.

Waalwijk will take the win and the memory. PSV will take the long road home, wondering how an evening of so much possession yielded so little.