It is easy to understand why Egypt would feel so frustrated after Tuesday’s 3-2 defeat.<\/p>\n
The Africans had led 2-0 with 11 minutes to play, on the brink of a historic first-ever quarter-final appearance.<\/p>\n
But it all went wrong as Argentina stormed back to turn the game on its head and score the winner in stoppage time.<\/p>\n
Egypt say there was something more suspect at play. They put their exit down to “serious refereeing mistakes” and “double standards” from French referee Francois Letexier and his team.<\/p>\n
The Pharaohs had a goal ruled out through a video assistant referee (VAR) intervention.<\/p>\n
They also claim Argentina’s winner should have been disallowed, and a penalty awarded to them instead.<\/p>\n
Mostafa Zico’s brilliant goal was chalked off after Marwan Attia was penalised for stepping on the foot of Lisandro Martinez at the start of the move.<\/p>\n
It was controversial, but they were leading 1-0 and did score a second goal nine minutes later. You cannot prove the game would have taken a different path had Zico’s goal stood.<\/p>\n
Egypt believed there were two potential penalty claims in their favour before Enzo Fernandez headed home the clinching goal.<\/p>\n
Hamdi Fathy went to ground claiming he was held by Alexis Mac Allister, which was unclear on replays, while Mohamed Salah felt he was tripped by Julian Alvarez.<\/p>\n
There were some similarities between the Martinez and Salah situations, with foot-on-foot contact, but not enough to constitute a penalty.<\/p>\n
Egypt stood a better chance of getting the goal chalked off if Salah had been outside the area. The VAR would merely be judging a foul – as was the case with Martinez – rather than a penalty.<\/p>\n
Controversial? Absolutely. But it is hardly proof of a conspiracy in favour of Messi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is easy to understand why Egypt would feel so frustrated after Tuesday’s 3-2 defeat. The Africans had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":680724,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-680723","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\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680723","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=680723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/680724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}