DOHA, Qatar — From the Moroccan national anthem that boomed across Al Thumama Stadium at the outset through a Moroccan goal in first-half stoppage time that wound up disallowed, the noise that traveled all the way across the Arab world to the first Arab World Cup seemed to spend Sunday afternoon just hankering to thunder.
Oh, it thundered all right, its great sound burrowing into the hair follicles and driving up the bumps at just about 73 minutes, the time a 25-year-old substitute who used to play for the German under-21 team banged a free kick from left of the area with the game still goalless. Abdelhamid Sabiri’s bid curled leftward past all the gathered players and then plunged into the front edge of the goal over the desperate forearm of one of the world’s best goalkeepers, and the stadium sounded like oh-my-goodness.
Goodness.
MOROCCO TAKES THE LEAD VS BELGIUM 🇲🇦😱 pic.twitter.com/hhCQVeHCaO
— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) November 27, 2022
By the time about 20 minutes later when the sound managed to grow a notch more, it backdropped the clinching of Morocco’s cherished 2-0 win over favored Belgium, FIFA’s second-ranked team. That happened two minutes into stoppage time. With porousness in the back, Chelsea player Hakim Ziyech found a loose ball, dribbled to the right and crossed back to Zakaria Aboukhlal in the box.
When Aboukhlal, another substitute, struck that thing into the near right top corner past Thibaut Courtois, the masses of fans bounced and hugged and the players went into the sujud posture and the noise mushroomed, greeting the kind of major breakthrough for which African teams have yearned here.
“Look, it is a big competition,” said Walid Regragui, a former Morocco defender and the new Morocco manager. “We played against maybe one of the best teams of the world, with big players.” Yet they forged through “with these fans, with these players, with this spirit.”
It vaulted them up through rugged Group F with four points, ahead of Belgium but behind Croatia, who have a date to play each other Thursday while Morocco gets Canada next. It became the third World Cup match win in Moroccan history, following upon beating Portugal in 1986 and Scotland in 1998. It hinted at the possibility of a first visit to the knockout stage since 1986 in Mexico, where Morocco bowed out in a creditable round-of-16 loss to West Germany. It led to Moroccan players strewn around the pitch, some in exhaustion and others in sujud, after the whistle, their passionate efforts rewarded. And it bolstered the notion that maybe the great generation of Belgium, quarterfinalists in 2014 and semifinalists in 2018, has breathed on past its peak.
“I think it’s fair to say that we are not at our best,” longtime manager Roberto Martinez said, noting “a fear of losing” and saying: “We played with too much responsibility. We need to find that freedom, that expression.” He said that on the same weekend the Guardian published an interview from earlier this month with Belgium and Manchester City star Kevin De Bruyne, in which de Bruyne said: “I think our chance was 2018. We have a good team, but it is aging. We lost some key players. We have some good new players coming, but they are not at the level other players were in 2018. I see us more as outsiders.”
That didn’t dent the notion that being among the 43,738 on Sunday turned out to be a place to be because of the Moroccan merriment alone. From the pregame, the Moroccan fans carried the occasion. They sang and chanted and drummed while crossing the zigzagging pedestrian bridge. They outnumbered the Belgian contingent maybe tenfold even as their population outnumbers that of Belgium by threefold.
Then their team grabbed itself a deathless moment after replacing its manager just three months ago and its goalkeeper just after the anthems Sunday. Even with former manager Vahid Halilhodzic sacked in August in favor of Regragui and with starting goalkeeper Yassine Bounou citing vision problems and yielding to Munir Mohamedi in a situation rare to the sport, Morocco went and got its joy partly through the substitutions of Regragui, who sent on Sabiri in the 68th minute and Aboukhlal in the 73rd.
Their goals lifted a team whose defense seldom is an issue and certainly hasn’t been here, allowing zero goals thus far against Croatia and Belgium with the Paris Saint-German bulwark Achraf Hakimi as its leader. Players such as Ziyech and Sofiane Boufal excelled, with Regragui saying of Ziyech, who formerly was in exile from the team: “You know, this guy is incredible. The spirit, when he come in his national team, has come back. A lot of people talk about him, about he is crazy guy, he is difficult guy to manage, he can’t help the team. For me, what I see is when you give him a lot of confidence, he can die for you. And it’s what I give him.”
Amid all of that the Belgians proved pretty much toothless, with little to speak of in the way of major threats against Mohamedi, who did just fine all told while his teammates wound up with an extra threat to discard. It came at the close of the first half, also from a set piece.
Ziyech’s free kick from the left also went in and went by Courtois, glancing off the right side of his rib cage because he could not track its path. He could not track its path because Hakimi and Romain Saiss burst into his sightline, with Saiss having gone offside by an arm beforehand even as the ball appeared to sail just over his head without touching even a hair.
The Moroccan fans made a great ton of noise upon that, although a video review nullified the goal, but that turned out okay. Their lungs and hearts would get further, more exhilarating opportunities.