Despite a season which saw him score 21 times in all competitions to help Palace lift the Uefa Conference League trophy, Sarr, more than most, will feel he has done something, somewhere, to offend the international sporting gods.<\/p>\n
With the Afcon final against hosts Morocco locked at 0-0 at the start of second-half injury time, it was his headed ‘goal’ from a corner which was ruled out by referee Jean-Jacques Ndala, who had blown his whistle moments earlier for a foul.<\/p>\n
It was a very soft decision and Senegal were aggrieved.<\/p>\n
Minutes later, with virtually no time left on the clock, Morocco were handed the chance to doom Senegal, with Ndala going to the pitchside monitor following another corner, this time adjudging that Brahim Diaz had been unfairly hauled over by full-back El Hadji Malick Diouf.<\/p>\n
The chaos which followed at the Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium<\/a> has blown a giant hole in the image of African football.<\/p>\n While I frantically tried to type out my match report in the media tribune, head down, a BBC colleague repeatedly tapped me on the shoulder to point out things like rioting fans, injured stewards being carried across the pitch and Senegal players leaving it.<\/p>\n After a long delay, in which Sadio Mane was among those who coaxed the team back out of the dressing room, I was left with my jaw on the floor as Diaz missed his penalty in the 24th minute of added time,<\/a> dinking it Panenka-style into the grateful arms of Edouard Mendy.<\/p>\n Senegal went on to win the game 1-0 in extra time, only to see a Confederation of African Football appeal board strip them of the title two months later.<\/a> The case is currently with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, with Senegal having vowed a “crusade”<\/a> to overturn the decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite a season which saw him score 21 times in all competitions to help Palace lift the Uefa…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":529554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-529553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}