Neom Stuns Al-Hilal in Roshn League Clash
Al-Hilal’s perfect start to the Roshn League season was ripped up in a bruising night against a ruthless, disciplined Neom side that refused to blink.
Bounou blow before a ball is kicked
The mood changed before kick-off. Al-Hilal arrived on a run of five straight league wins, confidence high, rhythm set. Then Yassine Bounou pulled up injured in the warm-up.
Suddenly, Mohammed Al-Owais was thrown in from the bench and into the spotlight. The disruption was obvious. The leaders never quite found their usual tempo.
Neom sensed it.
Compact, aggressive and superbly drilled, the hosts squeezed the space in front of Al-Hilal’s stars, closing passing lanes and forcing the league leaders to shoot from distance. The Blues’ usual fluency vanished into a wall of white shirts.
Koulibaly own goal stuns the leaders
The first real crack came early.
On 15 minutes, Kalidou Koulibaly turned the ball into his own net, gifting Neom the opener and tearing up Simone Inzaghi’s game plan. One moment of misjudgment, and the league’s form side were chasing a match they had expected to control.
Al-Hilal tried to respond immediately, but every attack met the same fate. Neom’s block held firm. Sultan Al-Ghannam probed, Krisencio Summerville looked for gaps, yet almost everything came from outside the box and barely tested the Neom goal.
The leaders had the ball. Neom had the structure.
Inzaghi rolls the dice
After the break, Inzaghi went to his bench. Nasser Al-Dawsari, Sultan Mandash and Mohamed Kader Mete all came on as the Italian coach searched for sharper movement and more incision in the final third.
The chances finally came. They just weren’t taken.
Five minutes into the second half, Gabriel Martinelli broke clear, one-on-one with the Neom goalkeeper. It should have been the equaliser. Instead, he squandered it, the kind of miss that shifts the mood in a stadium.
Three minutes later, Ruben Neves curled a precise effort inches wide of the left post. The pressure was rising, the leaders looked close to breaking through.
Then Marcin Bulka took over the night.
Bulka slams the door shut
On 65 minutes, Bulka produced the defining moment. Ollie Watkins met a cross with a dangerous header inside the box, seemingly destined for the corner. Bulka exploded across his line, clawing it away and, with it, much of Al-Hilal’s belief.
It wasn’t a one-off. The Neom goalkeeper had already turned away other Al-Hilal efforts in the half, each save adding to the sense that this was his game now, his clean sheet to protect.
From there, Neom tightened their grip. They slowed the tempo, managed the duels, and ran the clock with the authority of a side that knew exactly what this result would mean. The two-goal cushion held, and with it came a statement: the leaders can be rattled.
Neom closed it out, a controlled, calculated 2–0 win that felt bigger than just three points.
A first domestic setback for Inzaghi’s Al-Hilal
For Al-Hilal, the numbers sting. They stay on 15 points, their first Roshn League defeat of the season halting a run of five straight wins. More than that, it was their first domestic loss since Simone Inzaghi took charge at the start of last season.
The aura of invincibility took a hit.
Neom, meanwhile, climb to 12 points with a fourth league victory, right into the slipstream of the contenders and with a signature scalp to their name.
And somewhere in Riyadh, Al-Nassr will have watched it all with interest. They also sit on 12 points heading into their clash with Abha on Wednesday. Win that, and the gap to the leaders shrinks to a single point.
The title race just opened its eyes.
