Yep.. those gems stakes are a pain. you click, defeat them and gone. Or at least that is what happens to me often.
i think it's because the game is out of synch tho..
But i also hear of cases as yours, when it showed gem stakes and changed while the time was nowhere near 0:00
Also the other way around tho..

What a horrible fail streak. i never had that thankfully.. seems so random on my end. Are there more people witch such streaks? Guess so just have horrible luck. Even one of my gm that got 14 cards on a tuesday didn't get such a fail rate (10/14 failed tho)

Last thing.. that leader cards with a 90% succes rate fail so often seems so wrong to me.
if i take the actual numbers in my guild it doesn't look like a 90% chance really. They are hard to obtain and fail way too often. That Really sucks. On that matter changes could and should be made imho.