Austria boss Ralf Rangnick said it was “mad” to suggest there was any agreement in place to engineer a scripted draw.<\/p>\n
He insisted the unpredictable final 15 minutes of the game in Kansas City clearly showed neither side was looking to repeat the ‘Disgrace of Gijon’.<\/p>\n
“In this match, when you have a 3-3, nobody can assume that it was an agreement, especially after what we saw during the last 90 seconds,” said Rangnick.<\/p>\n
“If, with three minutes to play, somebody had said this would happen, you would have told them they were mad.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been a coach for about 40 years and I don’t even remember a match that had such a dramatic course and such an unexpected trajectory.<\/p>\n
“Most people anticipated a 0-0 or 1-1, and now it’s 3-3. It’s incredible – the dressing room is madness. If Alfred Hitchcock had written such a drama, I probably would have said he was completely mad.”<\/p>\n
Algeria manager Vladimir Petkovic also dismissed talk of any arrangement.<\/p>\n
“I’m extremely happy that, at the end, it was football that won, that prevailed – 3-3 as a score says it all,” he added.<\/p>\n
Austria face Spain in the last 32 in Los Angeles on Thursday, 2 July (20:00 BST), while Algeria take on Switzerland in Vancouver on Friday, 3 July (04:00 BST).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Austria boss Ralf Rangnick said it was “mad” to suggest there was any agreement in place to engineer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":732385,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-732384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/732385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}