Rennes storms back to beat OFI 2-1 in stoppage time in the Europa League

OFI jumped ahead in the ninth minute at Roazhon Park, and for a long stretch it looked like that blow might hold up. It didn't: Rennes ended up flipping the scoreline in the closing stages to seal a 2-1 win that arrived just as the match was wrapping up, with a goal in the 89th minute that settled things in the stoppage time before the additional added time. The result came in the league phase of the Europa League.

The start was a cold shower for the home side. Taxiarchis Fountas found himself unmarked in the box and headed home, low and inside the left post, a cross from Nikolaos Athanasiou, making it 0-1 when the match had barely gotten going. Rennes had come out pressing forward into the opposing box, but OFI's goal arrived on one of the Greek side's few counters of the night.

From there, the script barely changed: Rennes took control of the ball and began piling up chances without the score budging. Before halftime they had, among other looks, a shot from Aboubakar Nagida that crashed off the crossbar and a header from Charlie Cresswell that was saved, but the first half ended with OFI still ahead 0-1.

In the second half the story continued much the same for a good while: more home chances, more saves from the visiting goalkeeper, and the sense that the equalizer was taking longer to arrive than the run of play suggested. Then, in the 75th minute, Aboubakar Nagida struck a left-footed shot from the center of the box that flew straight into the top right corner to make it 1-1. The equalizer didn't change the script: Rennes kept pushing for the second goal.

And they found it at the tensest possible moment. In the 89th minute, with the match already deep into stoppage time, Abdelhamid Ait Boudlal struck a right-footed shot from the center of the box to make it 2-1, just a minute after Aboubakar Nagida had seen another attempt saved by OFI's goalkeeper. The closing stretch of the match, with four minutes added on by the fourth official, produced no further drama, and the game closed out with the comeback complete.

Dominance confirmed by the numbers

The match statistics paint a fairly accurate picture of what played out on the field: a Rennes side that controlled the ball and carried the attacking weight, and an OFI side that stuck almost exclusively to defending and striking when it could.

That superiority also shows up in the xG generated in the match, an in-house estimate calculated from shot locations: 1.99 for Rennes against just 0.08 for OFI. Those numbers explain why, despite trailing for much of the match, the final result didn't end up being much of a surprise in terms of chance creation.

In fact, heading into the match we had projected a 56% chance of a Rennes win, a 24% chance of a draw and a 20% chance for OFI, with expected goals of 2.05 for the home side and 1.19 for the visitors. The final result, with Rennes winning 2-1 after falling behind on the scoreboard, ended up lining up fairly well with what we had anticipated, even though the road to get there had the early jolt of Fountas's goal.

What it means in the standings

With this result, Rennes reaches 4 points so far in the league phase, with a record of one win and one draw from their two matches played. OFI, meanwhile, sits on 3 points after one win and one loss. In the overall table, just a single point separates the two sides, though it's still early to draw firm conclusions about where either team is headed in the tournament.