The Olympic Games officially begin on Friday. The first football matches were played on Wednesday. The end of the match between Morocco and Argentina was more than strange.
The official opening ceremony of the Olympic Games will take place on Friday evening. However, the first competitions started on Wednesday. In football, Uzbekistan and Spain (1:2) and Argentina and Morocco faced off, with the matches kicking off at 3 p.m.
While the Spaniards fought for a narrow victory, it was unclear for a long time whether the Argentinians' match was even over. The reason for this was the events in the final minutes in Saint-Étienne.
The Moroccans were leading 2-1 until deep into injury time. However, referee Glenn Nyberg from Sweden allowed 15 minutes of extra time, so that the favored Argentinians had plenty of time to equalize. And indeed: in the 16th minute of injury time (!) Cristian Medina from Boca Juniors headed the redeeming 2-2. Or maybe not?
Apparently, Medina could have been just offside. The official website of the Olympic Games showed that the video assistant was checking the goal. At the same time, there was commotion on the pitch. Fans stormed onto the pitch, and fireworks could be seen on the live stream from the broadcaster Discovery+ (part of Eurosport). Images from the video screens in the stadium show fans being asked to head to the exit. But it was unclear whether the match had even ended yet.
On the Olympic website, the status of the game changed from “in progress” to “interrupted”. It was not until a good three quarters of an hour after the strange events that the game was declared over on the Olympic website. Medina's goal stood, or so it was thought. However, shortly after 7 p.m., the game was restarted after an interruption of almost two hours. Argentina's Bruno Amione had been offside before the supposed 2-2, so the equalizer was annulled and the last three minutes of the game were played out – now in front of a ghost crowd. Nothing more happened. Morocco won the game 2-1.
Fans had previously suspected a conspiracy on the short message service “X” and thought that 15 minutes of stoppage time was far too long. Eurosport commentator Christoph Fetzer also initially thought it was a “graphics error”, as he told t-online in an interview. He would have thought that five to seven minutes of stoppage time was appropriate. In fact, only two minutes were initially shown, but this was then gradually increased to 15 minutes.
Ultimately, the long stoppage time had no negative impact. However, the match will certainly go down in the history of the Olympic Games.
