Canada became the first co-host to exit the 2026 World Cup as they were well beaten by Morocco in Houston.<\/p>\n
The Moroccans, having failed to impress in a bad-tempered first half, took the lead five minutes after the interval through Azzedine Ounahi.<\/p>\n
Ounahi swept home Achraf Hakimi’s cut-back free kick from inside the D as the Canadian defence failed to close him down.<\/p>\n
The Girona midfielder scored his second by converting a breakaway with eight minutes remaining to seal victory.<\/p>\n
And an ultimately comfortable win was topped off in stoppage time as Soufiane Rahimi slid his shot under keeper Maxime Crepeau.<\/p>\n
It was tough on Canada, who had started by far the stronger team in Texas and should have led early on.<\/p>\n
But Morocco progress, as they move one win away from equalling their historic run to the semi-finals at the 2022 World Cup.<\/p>\n
Canada pressed the Moroccans relentlessly from the start, and both Jonathan David and Tani Oluwaseyi were denied one on one by Morocco keeper Bono inside the opening 11 minutes.<\/p>\n
The African side were below par and clearly frustrated for long periods as seven yellow cards were shown by English referee Michael Oliver.<\/p>\n
But Morocco ultimately came through and were close to a third when Rahimi looped a header off the crossbar – before the striker finally got his goal with the last touch of the match.<\/p>\n
It means Canada’s most successful men’s World Cup campaign comes to an end – a tournament in which they earned their first point, win, group stage progression and knock-out victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canada became the first co-host to exit the 2026 World Cup as they were well beaten by Morocco…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":673885,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-673884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/673885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}