After protesting to CAF that Nigeria fielded two foreigners, Ashleigh Plumptre and Michelle Alozie against them in the WAFCON final Saturday and should be disqualified and the trophy awarded to them, Moroccans are again blaming the Tanzanian referee, Antsino Twanyanyukwa for denying them a penalty that could have given them victory.
A Moroccan journalist, Aymen Alami writing in an online medium, Morocco World News said that the referee “delivered a performance that left Moroccan players stunned, fans enraged, and experts baffled.”
He claimed that Morocco was robbed after “VAR awarded Nigeria a soft penalty, claiming Moroccan defender Nouhaila Benzina had handled the ball”, adding that the same VAR made the referee to change her decision to award a penalty to Morocco after “Nigeria’s Oluwatosin Demehin blatantly handled the ball inside the area”.
Alami also quoted another Moroccan and former referee Hicham Tiazi as saying that “The referee should have stuck to her decision and awarded a penalty to Morocco.”
Morocco’s coach Jorge Vilda also cried foul, saying, “We can’t understand the decision made by thereferee. She gave a penalty, but then the images we saw were not the same as those presented to the referee. The images were clear, we were sure she had to give a penalty.”
“There was a penalty that should have been, the referee had blown for it, but then [went] to VAR. We saw there was a hand, but the referee took it off us. That’s what determined that we weren’t able to celebrate this match – the penalty that was taken away from us.”
“The fact it wasn’t given as a penalty had an immediate impact on the players. It had a psychological impact that shocked us; it was a massive hit to the players. It made it hard for us to come back … football was hard towards our team,” he told ESPN.
