The semi-final between Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the Arabian Gulf Cup “Gulf 27” turned on two contentious refereeing calls in extra time.<\/p>\n
Saudi Arabia met Qatar on Saturday at Al-Inma Stadium in Jeddah.<\/p>\n
In the 104th minute, the ball dropped to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Al-Qahtani on the edge of Qatar’s penalty area. He hammered it goalwards, only for it to strike the Qatari defence.<\/p>\n
Furious, Al-Qahtani, his team-mates and Greek coach Georgios Donis demanded a penalty, convinced the ball had struck the Qatari defender’s hand.<\/p>\n
The referee waved play on from the outset and stuck with that call after a VAR review.<\/p>\n
Refereeing expert Mohammed Kamal Risha backed the official, telling Saudi newspaper “Al-Riyadiah” that the decision was correct.<\/p>\n
“There is no penalty for Saudi Arabia in the 104th minute, as the ball struck the midriff of the Qatari defender, and there was no handball,” Risha said. “It was a correct decision by the referee to allow play to continue, with the backing of the VAR room.”<\/p>\n
Seven minutes later, the drama returned. Abdullah Al-Hamdan drilled a powerful effort that caught the hand of a Qatar defender inside the box, yet once again the referee refused to point to the spot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The semi-final between Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the Arabian Gulf Cup “Gulf 27” turned on two contentious…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":635485,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[278103,85,46,1823,78,286259,105],"class_list":["post-635484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-gulf-cup","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-qatar","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-saudi-arabia-vs-qatar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635484\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/635485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}