Marseille Beat Le Havre 4-3 After Leading 4-0 as Maja Scores Two Late Goals

Olympique Marseille beat Le Havre AC 4-3 at the CEPAC Velodrome in Marseille on Sunday in Ligue 1 Matchday 8, holding on for the win after leading 4-0 and then conceding three late goals. Josh Maja came on as a substitute in the 61st minute and scored twice for Le Havre in the closing stages, from a penalty in the 77th minute and with a header in the 89th minute, but Marseille kept their lead to the final whistle.

A 4-0 lead built across both halves

Marseille led 2-0 at half time. They scored twice more in the second half to lead 4-0, a margin that reflected control of the scoreboard even if the final minutes told a different story. The four Marseille goals were shared by four different players, with one goal each for Timothy Weah, Himad Abdelli, Igor Paixao and CJ Egan-Riley. No goal minutes for the Marseille scorers were available in the sources checked, so this report does not assign minutes to those four goals.

The Marseille side named before kickoff included Jeffrey de Lange in goal, with Timothy Weah, CJ Egan-Riley, Nayef Aguerd and Emerson in the group listed by the confirmed lineups, and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, Amine Harit, Himad Abdelli, Igor Paixao and Amine Gouiri also named. Three of the players in that group, Weah, Abdelli and Paixao, were among the scorers, and Egan-Riley added the other goal.

Maja leads the late Le Havre reply

Le Havre were still 4-0 down when Maja entered the match. He had replaced Rassoul N'Diaye in the 61st minute, and in the 77th minute he pulled a goal back from a penalty to make the score 4-1. At that point the goal looked like a consolation for a side that had trailed by four goals at their opponents' ground.

The closing minutes changed the mood of the match. In the 86th minute Lamine N'Diaye headed a second Le Havre goal to make it 4-2. Three minutes later, in the 89th minute, Maja headed his second goal of the match, assisted by Kaito Mizuta, to make it 4-3. Le Havre had scored three goals after falling 4-0 behind, and Marseille had to protect a one goal lead through the final moments. They did so, and the match finished 4-3.

Bottom side fight, but no points

Le Havre arrived in Marseille at the bottom of Ligue 1. Before the match they were in 18th place with 2 points and no win from seven matches. Marseille had 9 points from seven matches before kickoff. Those numbers explain why a 4-0 lead for the home side fit the pre-match picture, and also why Le Havre's late scoring run stood out. A bottom side with 2 points scored three times in the final part of the match at the Velodrome, two of them through a substitute who had been on the field for only part of the second half.

The fightback did not bring Le Havre a point. Marseille take the win from a match they led 2-0 at half time and 4-0 in the second half, while Le Havre leave with three goals scored and no reward in the table from this match. The final score was confirmed by both the Sportradar match centre, which recorded Marseille as the winner at 4-3, and the Sports Mole match page, which recorded the same 4-3 score and the same 2-0 half time score.