By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Morocco’s leading scorer, Brahim Diaz, stood poised to make history – to score the goal that would end his country’s agonizing 50-year wait to win the coveted African Cup of Nations (AFCON).
Senegal’s goalkeeper, Edouard Mendy, was focused to thwart the effort.
The world waited with bated breath.
Brahim Diaz had won the controversial penalty in the 8th minute of added time in the pulsating second-half added time of the AFCON final match in Morocco.
The match was goalless at the time, and scoring the penalty would have been the last kick of the game, only to be followed by the lifting of the continental trophy.
It needs to be recalled that the Senegalese players had protested the award of the penalty-kick and had walked off the pitch, and they were urged to do so by their 44-year-old coach Pape Thiaw.
The match was delayed for nearly 20 minutes following the walkout of Senegal’s players.
It’s noteworthy seeing the veteran coach of African football, Claude Le Roy, talking with the maestro of Senegal, Sadio Mane, and asking him to urge his teammates to come back into the field of play to complete the match.
Sadio Mane braced up to the task and made splendid work of getting the plyers back into the field.
The match referee, Jean Jacques Ndala, who had made a number of questionable calls in the course of the match, awarded the spot-kick in the 98th minute following a VAR advice to consult the pitch-side monitor to review Senegalese defender El Hadji Malick Diouf’s challenge on Morocco’s Brahim Diaz.
Tempers were boiling because referee Ndala had a couple of minutes earlier disallowed a goal scored by Senegal’s Ismaila Sarr, supposedly for a foul by Abdoulaye Seck on Achraf Hakimi in the build-up.
With the return of the players to the field of play, somewhat reluctantly, for the penalty-kick to be taken, African football was saved from the disaster of an abandoned final.
A jam-packed stadium watched as the top scorer of the tournament with five goals, Brahim Diaz, stepped forward in the bid to beat Senegal’s goalie Edouard Mendy.
The fervid concentration on the face of Diaz in the build-up to taking the kick was not matched by the weak cheeky “Panenka” penalty that he orchestrated.
The ball was easily caught by Mendy, without breaking a sweat.
A dispirited Diaz walked away while Mendy and his teammates celebrated as referee Ndala blew the full-time whistle for extra-time to supervene.
If Diaz had scored the last minute winner through the controversial penalty, Senegal would have felt hard done by while most soccer aficionados could dismiss Morocco’s victory as a Greek gift.
The soft Panenka miss by Diaz in my estimation saved African football from odium.
Diaz’s Panenka cheek for me represents the old cliche: whom the gods want to destroy they first make mad!
Why apply showboating style instead of hitting straight at goal given the controversial circumstances?
Well, to give him his due, Brahim Diaz’s ill-judged Panenka paradoxically saved African football.
Panenka owes its name to a player of the then Czechoslovakia named Antonin Panenka who in the 1976 European Championship final outrageously chipped his penalty-kick down the middle to beat legendary West German goalkeeper Sepp Maier to help his underdog country win the cup against the defending champions via a penalty shootout in the tournament hosted by the then Yugoslavia.
After a quick run, Panenka had befuddled the goalie, Sepp Maier, by floating a delicate chip down the middle of the goal.
Many players have over the years copied the Panenka style, some to woeful results like Brahim Diaz’s, notably Ademola Lookman, scorer of Nigeria’s winning penalty in the AFCON third-place shootout victory over Egypt, who had back in 2020 missed a last gasp Panenka penalty in the 98th minute for Fulham FC in an English Premier League match against West Ham.
In the end, as the AFCON final match between Morocco and Senegal panned out, referee Ndala blew the full-time whistle after Brahim’Diaz’s Panenka miss, and when play resumed for extra-time Senegal’s Pape Gueye scored the winning goal in the 4th minute through a stunner.
Senegal thus lifted her second AFCON title while Morocco has to wait longer for another title after the 1976 triumph.
I can in good conscience stress that justice was served with the victory of Senegal. The antics of Morocco as the host nation were inimical to the beautiful game – earning dubious calls, intimidating opposing players and visiting spectators, racially throwing bananas at Nigeria’s goalie Nwabali, tampering with goalies’ towels etc.
Senegal’s coach Thiaw deserves his ban for calling out his players from the field of play, and Morocco coach Walid Regragui was right to state that his rival’s action was “shameful” as it did not “honour Africa.”
Emotions must not get the better of anybody in the course of playing the beautiful game.
It is cool by me in the end that Brahim Diaz’s Panenka penalty miss served as the saviour for African football.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, the author of God of Poetry, writes from Awka, Anambra State.
