Nigeria had not been shy in expressing their intentions of winning their 10th Wafcon, with players consistently asked about that target in media engagements.<\/p>\n
The Super Falcons have certainly backed up their off-field talk in their performances in Morocco this month as coach Justin Madugu found the right blend in the knockout phase.<\/p>\n
Yet the top-ranked side in Africa made a poor start and Nigeria were unable to match Morocco’s level in the first half.<\/p>\n
The North Africans went ahead in the 13th minute when Halimatu Ayinde gave the ball to Chebbak, who sent a fine shot just inside the left-hand upright, and doubled their lead 11 minutes later when Mssoudy shot across goal.<\/p>\n
Okoronkwo was composure personified after the intervention of VAR to make it 2-1 from the spot, and then kept her head when she burst through the Morocco defence to control, pause and put the ball on a plate for Ijamilusi.<\/p>\n
Another big moment came when Morocco were awarded a penalty in the 79th minute when Imane Saoud helped a cross onto the hand of Blessing Demehin, who was barely two yards away.<\/p>\n
Chebbak had the ball on the spot when Namibian referee Antsino Twanyanyukwa was called to the VAR screen and overturned her decision almost four minutes later.<\/p>\n
And the comeback was completed when Okoronkwo provided a pin-point free-kick delivery and Echegini got ahead of centre-back Benzina to sweep home from six yards out.<\/p>\n
The West Africans have now beaten a third host nation in a Wafcon final following successes over South Africa and Cameroon in 2000 and 2016 respectively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nigeria had not been shy in expressing their intentions of winning their 10th Wafcon, with players consistently asked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25414,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-25413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}