Salah does it again for Egypt

Salah scoring is not the shocking part here, because he has done this for years and he will keep doing it as long as he is on the pitch. The shocking part is how quickly the whole game has become about the referee, and that is on the officials more than anyone else. If you are New Zealand, you are absolutely entitled to feel hard done by, and if you are Egypt you are obviously delighted, but the standard has looked messy and the constant inconsistency is doing my head in because every decision is being questioned and nobody trusts anything anymore, which is exactly how you end up with everyone screaming at the screen and losing the plot
 
i was half watching and half scrolling and then suddenly everyone in the room was shouting about the ref and salah at the same time, proper tournament football this, you never get a calm five minutes and honestly i love it even when it is annoying because it just feels like something big is happening every second
 
Egypt looked more dangerous once the play opened up, which is why the missed foul is such a big talking point. If the whistle goes earlier, the whole sequence never develops and the goal never becomes an issue.
 
New Zealand really thought they were getting away with it and then Salah just turns up and reminds everyone who he is, absolute classic, meanwhile the ref is out there making himself the main character like some sort of whistle merchant
 
From a footballing perspective, the sequence is what matters because if there was a clear foul in the lead-up then the officials have to deal with it properly, and if they do not, the entire match gets distorted. But the emotional side of it is that fans are fed up with seeing the same kind of inconsistency over and over again, and when a moment involving Salah happens the debate becomes ten times louder because everyone already expects him to decide games. It is exhausting, honestly, because you want to talk about the player and the finish and instead you end up screaming at the screen about a ref who has somehow made himself bigger than the game, and that is just bloody maddening
 
The wider issue is not just the single decision, it is the pattern of uneven control. Once a referee loses credibility with both sides, every contact becomes a flashpoint and the match stops feeling fair.
 
How can you let a game get this messy and then act shocked when everyone is furious, the standard of refereeing has been all over the place and now this one moment is going to dominate everything because the official could not keep control of the basic stuff, every little touch by New Zealand gets treated like a crime and Egypt can get away with far more and then the ball goes forward and suddenly we are supposed to pretend none of it happened, absolute shambles, if you are going to allow physical play then actually allow it for both sides and if you are going to blow then blow properly instead of this half and half nonsense that has everyone on edge and shouting at the screen
 
People are acting like New Zealand have somehow been lucky to be in the conversation at all, but they have every right to be angry about that sequence because if there was a foul then they have been done over in a huge moment and that hurts no matter who the opponent is. At the same time, it is embarrassing how quickly some fans turn every incident into a reason to dismiss the team that lost the moment, because Egypt still have to play the football and Salah still has to be in the right place to score, which he was. That does not mean the whole thing should be shrugged off though, and the way people are talking like the officials are above criticism is exactly why everyone gets so wound up, because if you are on the wrong end of that you feel properly stitched up and then every replay just makes it worse and worse and worse
 
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