Arsal Sheikh

🚨🗣️New: Pepe on the controversial officiating decisions in Egypt and Argentina game, Messi and Argentina are being favored: “Today the whole world watched the same match. Egypt scored a perfectly good goal, celebrated it, earned it, and then VAR suddenly turned into a time machine. They went so far back looking for a reason to disallow it that I thought they were reviewing the pyramids being built. That is my first question. If VAR can travel that far into the past to cancel Egypt’s goal, why could it not travel five seconds into the future when Egypt were screaming for penalties? Funny, no? One team gets forensic investigation. The other gets silence. Egypt were leading. Egypt were controlling the game. Egypt were making Argentina uncomfortable. Then came the intervention that changed everything. The disallowed goal. The moment that shifted the entire momentum of the match. And after that? Two penalty appeals. Two. Not one. Two opportunities for the officials to show consistency. Nothing. No urgency. No transparency. No explanation that convinced anybody. Then Argentina go down the other end and score the winner. Football is a game of moments. The referee’s team decided which moments deserved attention and which moments deserved to disappear. People tell me Argentina showed champion mentality. I agree. But champion mentality and controversial officiating are not mutually exclusive things, Both can exist at the same time. What I cannot accept is the inconsistency. When Egypt scored, VAR searched every grain of sand in the desert looking for a foul. When Egypt asked for penalties, suddenly everybody became blind. That is why the Egyptian bench exploded. That is why cards were flying everywhere. That is why millions of fans left the stadium angry instead of simply disappointed. Because losing to Argentina is one thing. Feeling like the rules changed depending on who benefited is another. And this is what football fans hate the most. Not defeat. Not mistakes. Selective scrutiny. The feeling that one decision was examined with a microscope while another was viewed from outer space. Maybe Argentina would still have won. Maybe they would not. We will never know. Because the game was not allowed to reach its natural conclusion. Instead, Egypt leave the World Cup with questions. Questions about the disallowed goal, Questions about the ignored penalty appeals, Questions about consistency, Questions about why VAR looked like a sword against one team and a shield for another. And when football leaves people talking more about the officials than the players, that is not a victory for the sport. That is a failure. Today Egypt lost 3-2 on the scoreboard. But the debate over what really happened will win headlines for much longer than Argentina’s comeback.”