Emmanuel Addai finished off FK Qarabag’s 5-1 win over Neftci at the Palms Sports Arena with a 93rd‑minute strike, a final touch on a match that never truly threatened the visitors after the first half settled. Addai’s goal was his fourth of the league campaign and pushed his season tally to seven goal contributions, including three assists.
Musa Qurbanli opened the scoring nine minutes in, only for Elvin Badalov to pull Neftci level 12 minutes later. Qarabag would retake the lead before Toni Montiel stretched the advantage six minutes after the visitors regained it, and Leandro Andrade’s strike after halftime put the game beyond the hosts. Addai’s stoppage‑time finish made it 5-1 and completed what Qarabag also marked as the club’s 700th away goal.
The scoreline — 5-1 in the stadium where the postponed Misli Premier League match had been scheduled for 20:00 — underlines the gulf that opened between the sides. Kamranbay Rahimov was appointed as the head referee for the match. The result mirrored the most recent meeting between the two: Garabagh had beaten Neftchi 5-1 on April 26, a repeat heavy defeat that compounds questions about Neftci’s form at a crucial stretch of the season.
For Qarabag, the victory is more than a single emphatic night. The club sits second in the table with 59 points and the win keeps pressure on the title race; Qarabag are widely viewed as the most dominant team in recent times and are chasing the leaders while Sabah remain comfortably ahead. Neftci’s fifth‑place slot on 44 points now looks increasingly distant from the top of the table and exposes defensive frailties the visitors exploited repeatedly.
The match read like a neat chapter in a rivalry often billed locally as the Azerbaijan Derby: a big stadium, late kick‑off scheduling and a scoreline that reinforces patterns rather than upends them. Statistically the night belonged to Addai — his fourth league goal and his seventh direct involvement in goals this season — and to Qarabag’s collective firepower, which found the net five times away from home and reached the club milestone of a 700th away goal.
Tension inside the game arrived less from controversy than from repetition. Neftci’s lone bright moment — Badalov’s equalizer — briefly suggested a comeback, but Qarabag answered and extended the lead quickly, denying the hosts the narrative of recovery. That the fixture itself had been postponed and listed as neftçi vs qarabag fk for a 20:00 slot at the Palms Sports Arena adds another layer: scheduling disruptions have not masked a clear competitive gap between the teams.
The clearest consequence of Wednesday’s result is that Qarabag are unlikely to be written off in the title race anytime soon, and Neftci face a fast‑arriving list of fixes if they are to climb from fifth place. Emmanuel Addai’s night — the late goal, the goal tally and the seven goal contributions overall — provides a shorthand for Qarabag’s current edge: they have attacking players ready to decide games, and at 5-1 away they delivered a message the rest of the league will now have to answer.
