<\/p>\n
Argentina won its third World Cup in an extraordinary final on Sunday as they beat France 4-2 on penalties after Lionel Messi scored twice in a 3-3 draw that featured a hat-trick for Kylian Mbapp\u00e9 as the holders recovered from 2-0 down.<\/p>\n
It was an extraordinary night of drama, high emotion and fluctuating fortunes, delivering one of the all-time great finals to cap a wonderful tournament as its two-star players delivered command performances on the biggest stage of all.<\/p>\n
Argentina had looked to be cruising to a one-sided victory after Messi\u2019s penalty and a brilliant goal by Angel Di Maria in the first half put them in total control but Mbapp\u00e9 converted an 80th-minute penalty and volleyed in an equaliser a minute later to take the game to extra time.<\/p>\n
Messi put Argentina ahead again but Mbapp\u00e9 levelled with another penalty, becoming the second man to score a World Cup final hat-trick after England\u2019s Geoff Hurst in 1966.<\/p>\n
That took the game to a shootout where Argentina keeper Emiliano Martinez saved Kingsley Coman\u2019s effort and Aurelien Tchouameni fired wide to give Gonzalo Montiel the chance to win it, which he gleefully took.<\/p>\n
Argentina has now won six of its seven World Cup shootouts, including the quarter-final against the Netherlands a week ago when the country also blew a 2-0 lead, while France has lost three of five, but with two of those defeats coming in finals.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Argentina won its third World Cup in an extraordinary final on Sunday as they beat France 4-2 on penalties after Lionel Messi scored twice in a 3-3 draw that featured a hat-trick for Kylian Mbapp\u00e9 as the holders recovered from 2-0 down. It was an extraordinary night of drama, high emotion and fluctuating fortunes, delivering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1267292,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1267291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1267291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1267291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1267291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1267291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}