Morocco’s rise as a force in world football continued with a bronze medal win over Egypt on Thursday, with a 6-0 win. Paris Olympics 2024.
Morocco’s third-place finish at the 2024 Paris Olympics is a historic achievement, and another step in the right direction after finishing fourth behind Argentina, France and Croatia at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
Soufiane Rahimi scored twice and became the first player in Olympic history to score in six consecutive matches, taking his tally to 8 goals (double the number scored by his closest pursuer Philippe Mateta with 4 goals), adding to Morocco’s attacking prowess, which has scored 17 goals at the Olympics.
This is the first medal for Arab teams in football in the history of the Olympics, as Morocco joins the teams of Cameroon, Nigeria and Ghana, which won medals from the African continent.
The impact of Al-Khanous’ return and Zizo’s exit
The match had many details, including: the Moroccan national team regained much of its strength with the return of Bilal El Khannous in the number 10 position, and we mentioned in the Spain match how the “Atlas Cubs” were affected by his absence.
Bilal El Khannous shone clearly in today’s match and scored a goal, and exhausted Egyptian team With his movements behind the midfielders and receiving the ball in dangerous areas, to the point that he was creating spaces for his teammates.
On the other hand, the Egyptian team received a heavy blow with the injury of its star Ahmed Sayed Zizo and his early exit from the match (only 12 minutes) due to injury, knowing that Zizo is the second most player in the Olympics who created chances, and the Egyptian team is already suffering in terms of creating chances, which represents a severe blow.
Where is the Egyptian national team striker?
Believe it or not! The Pharaohs’ Olympic team striker Osama Faisal, who played for more than 86 minutes, touched the ball only twice inside the Moroccan penalty area. Imagine that defender Mohamed Tarek touched the ball the same number of times.
If this indicates anything, it indicates the absence of any offensive presence from the Pharaohs Olympic team that threatens the goal. MoroccoThis is what the average positioning of the Egyptian national team players in the picture above shows.
The picture shows that Osama Faisal was so far back that it made Egypt look like they had no striker. Things got worse when Zizo left, so the Egyptian team had to look for more presence in the Moroccan penalty area, and that didn’t happen.
Egypt without a goalkeeper.. All of Morocco’s shots were goals
Before the match, we mentioned that the Egyptian Olympic team is the team with the most shots in the Olympics (27 shots before today’s match), and if this indicates anything, it indicates the defensive weakness that occurred to Rogerio Micale’s team.
Morocco shot 6 times at goalkeeper Hamza Alaa’s goal, and all the shots found their way into his net without him being able to stop any shot, despite having a good tournament.
The Pharaohs’ defense was flabby with midfielder Mohamed Shehata in the right-back position, and right-back Mohamed Tarek in the center-back position, meaning that the defensive quartet was playing together for the first time, and two of them were out of position.
The big surprise is that the expected goals for the Moroccan team today were 1.24 goals, and yet they scored 6 goals, in other words, Egypt had almost no defense or goalkeeper.
