<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Croatia edged to a close-fought 2-1 victory over Morocco on Saturday to ensure a third-place finish at the World Cup (WC) in Qatar.<\/p>\n
Defender Josko Gvardiol, who has been one of the standout players at the tournament, scored a header on seven minutes to hand Croatia an early lead, but Morocco fired back shortly after through a close-range header from defender Achraf Dari in what was his first international goal.<\/p>\n
Morocco are the only African team in World Cup history to reach this stage of the competition, but they were consigned to a fourth-place finish as Croatia winger Mislav Orsic netted a superb curled effort on 42 minutes that proved to be the winner.<\/p>\n
Croatia finished runners-up in Russia four years ago and were hoping for an unlikely return to the final in Qatar, but saw their tournament end on Tuesday in a 3-0 semifinal defeat to Argentina. Croatia previously finished third in their first-ever World Cup appearance in 1998.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is bronze with a golden glow. We won a tough game,\u201d said Croatia coach Zlatko Dalic, who also led the nation of just 4 million people to their runners-up finish in Russia four years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a medal for the Croatian people\u2026 It\u2019s really great that we won two medals in two tournaments, big congratulations to my players.\u201d<\/p>\n
There were signs of nerves from Morocco early on with goalkeeper Yassine Bounou nearly scything a clearance into his own goal in just the third minute.<\/p>\n
The second half was not as fast or feisty as the first as exhaustion after a long tournament seemed to have caught up with both teams, playing their seventh game in Qatar.<\/p>\n
\u201cPhysically it was difficult, our players got tired, it was intense,\u201d Morocco coach Walid Regragui said.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 Croatia edged to a close-fought 2-1 victory over Morocco on Saturday to ensure a third-place finish at the World Cup (WC) in Qatar. Defender Josko Gvardiol, who has been one of the standout players at the tournament, scored a header on seven minutes to hand Croatia an early lead, but Morocco fired back shortly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1267451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[4372,2051,29244,2098,1010],"class_list":["post-1267450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-bronze","tag-claim","tag-croatia","tag-edge","tag-morocco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267450","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=1267450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1267450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1267450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1267450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}