Sabah’s return from Norway came without points on a night that began with promise and ended in a 4-1 defeat to Viking in the UEFA Champions League league phase. Valdas Dambrauskas’s side, who had gone into the fourth-round match ahead of Viking in the table, were beaten away in Stavanger after a game scheduled to kick off at 00:00 Baku time.
The match mattered because Sabah had started the day in 25th place with 3 points, while Viking were 33rd with 1 point. In a league-phase format where every result can shift position quickly, the gap before kickoff made Sabah the higher-ranked side on paper even before a ball was struck.
That did not hold for long. P. Mbina gave Sabah an early goal in the 11th minute, but Viking answered through E. Botheim in the 27th minute and then took control after the break. Z. Tripić made it 2-1 in the 69th minute, H. Falkener added a third in the 81st, and Falkener struck again in the 90+4th minute to finish the match. Dutch referee Sander van der Eijk oversaw the contest.
The result leaves the standings detail looking even starker than it did before kickoff. Sabah entered the match above Viking and still left without points, which is the kind of reversal that makes the league phase unforgiving: a team can carry the better record into the night and still be the one forced to reset afterward. For Sabah, the defeat also underlined how narrow the margin is in a phase where a single away trip can erase the advantage built earlier.
What comes next is the part Sabah cannot avoid. The side remains in the UEFA Champions League main stage, and the table will now be read through the lens of this loss rather than the promise that came with its pre-match points. For Dambrauskas, the task is no longer about the standings before Stavanger but about how quickly Sabah can answer the setback when the next match arrives.
