Seven Matches, Ten Goals: Al-Ittihad's 'Curse' Is a Structural Crack

The ball left Radhi Al-Otaibi's boot and climbed into the Dammam night, and the television camera never held the frame long enough to show us how high Al-Ittihad's defensive line was standing. It held the next frame instead: Sultan Haroon running onto the ball, no defender behind him, Serbian goalkeeper Predrag Rajkovic ahead of him. One pass from deep, and then a goalkeeper alone.

The shot went through Rajkovic's legs. The stand erupted, the camera cut to the faces of Al-Ittihad's defenders. What the screen showed was not a goalkeeping error. The goal had already happened much earlier — when Al-Otaibi's pass cut through the midfield and the back line in a single action. In the football I grew up with, we blamed the keeper for goals like this. Now I know the blame belongs to the height of the line, or to the decision not to press the passer.

What sits outside the headline

The Goal.com report carries the word 'curse' in its headline. Round ten, Saudi Roshn League 2026/26. Al-Ittihad have gone seven consecutive matches without a clean sheet — ten goals conceded across the domestic league and the AFC Champions League Elite combined, roughly 1.43 per game. That number is the fuel in the headline.

Al-Ittihad are a PIF-backed club at title-contender tier, active in continental competition as well. Al-Ettifaq are a mid-table side in Dammam, a club whose identity sits largely in its academy and in developing domestic talent. On paper this is a mismatch, and mismatches always sell better. The headline is built by placing a young man's first goal beside a giant's old wound.

After three decades behind a microphone I can say one thing with certainty: the commentator's hardest job is not adding words, it is removing them. When I took my first longform commission in 2026, I learned that the scoreline has to be held back until late. I learned to leave the derby — meaning, let the loudest fact arrive a little later than it wants to. This match works the same way: the headline is shouting 'curse', but the story underneath is quieter and far more structural.

Where the crack actually is

Seven matches without a clean sheet, across two separate competitions. That is where the real signal hides. A sustained failure in one competition can be the fixture list's fault; the same failure across two is the system's. The opponents change, the referees change, the grounds and the climate change — and the result stays identical. 'Bad luck' does not survive that kind of consistency.

The shape of the crack is clear too. Long ball, channel run, one against one. That mechanism points to one of three things: the line sits too high without cover; the back line steps up without coordinated pressure on the passer; or both at once. Conceding at 1.43 per game is a mid-to-lower-table defensive profile. A club chasing a title cannot carry that rate across a full season. The league's top sides generally sit below 1.0, but no league-average baseline appears in the source, so I am keeping that comparison as inference — the direction, though, is unmistakable.

One thing the report does not tell us, and it matters: how many of those seven were won, drawn or lost. Seven matches without a clean sheet is a defensive form metric, not a results metric. A reader who reaches a verdict from the headline alone is judging on half the evidence.

Fixture load belongs in this picture as well. Alongside the domestic league runs the AFC Champions League Elite — two regulatory regimes, two calendars, two sets of squad-registration rules. Rotate the defensive unit too little and fatigue accumulates, and the first thing a tired defender loses is positional patience. Fatigue is one reason a line drifts high.

What nobody writes

Here is my objection. The headline is about Al-Ittihad, but the match is about Al-Ettifaq's academy. Sultan Haroon — making only his second start of the season — scored his first goal of the campaign. A local youngster, against a PIF-backed giant. A small event, a large signal.

Twenty years of radio commentary, then eleven hours of tape in the archive hunting for the story of a single match, taught me one thing: the media's light always falls where the money is; the story is often born on the next pitch over. The reality of the Saudi league is that its headlines are almost entirely occupied by the PIF-backed clubs. The boy emerging from a mid-table academy stays outside that light, even though the league's long-term sustainability question lives exactly there.

And one more thing deserves saying. Blaming Rajkovic is easy, because a goalkeeper's mistake is visible and a structure's mistake is not. But in that goal he was left in a one-against-one — the product of a line broken before he was ever involved, not a goalkeeping error. Conceding through the legs is embarrassing. It is not the cause.

The word 'curse' is media language, not analytical language. Seven matches without a clean sheet is a statistical pattern; attaching something supernatural to it means naming the problem in a way that hides the solution. Had the name been 'structural failure', the coaching staff would be under far more pressure.

Notes from the tape room

I have an old suspicion about talent, and this match sharpened it. Transfer-market models love to price youth potential, but they cannot measure dressing-room chemistry. Al-Ittihad's problem sits precisely here — expensive attack, under-invested and under-coordinated defensive unit. Four big names can be assembled into a line; that line cannot be taught to move as one with money alone.

There is no shortcut from Bondy to the world, and none from the Dammam academy to the Al-Ittihad net either. Haroon's story is still on the front page, and precisely for that reason Al-Ettifaq's danger is inverted — their risk is not failure, it is success. Big clubs' scouting departments will now write the name down, and the eternal problem of the mid-table club begins right there. The contract renewal should happen now, before the goal count grows.

The next three matches

I want to watch the height of Al-Ittihad's line across the next three fixtures. If the line drops and the pressure on the passer increases, the coaching staff have recognised the problem. If the line stays where it is, that blueprint gets copied in every opposition video room — because the simplest remedy against a long ball is the one nobody is taking.

And one clean sheet erases this 'curse' story overnight. If the run stretches to ten, the word changes instead — from 'curse' to 'crisis'. Football's narratives move exactly like that, in step with results.

I have kept the last frame for myself. The Dammam floodlights, the ball in the net, and behind it a defender still running, who will not arrive. That is the real photograph of this match. Not a curse — a line that stepped one pace too far forward. The next match will tell us everything about that one pace.