Senegal are through to the knockout stages of the World Cup for only the second time after overcoming a very passive Ecuador team.
Onward then to the final round of group matches, otherwise known as The Round of Permutations – the point at which the World Cup gets complicated for a few days.
It’s a discombobulating stage of the tournament. It feels like there’s less football than there was, even though there isn’t, and the mathematics of it all can start to become overwhelming. They’re still packing in four matches a day at these World Cup finals until the end of this week, but with the final round of matches in each group being played simultaneously there will be no more 10 o’clock in the morning until nine at night marathons.
But allowing for extremely unlikely results not happening, in Group A it all essentially came down to Senegal needing to beat Ecuador. The Netherlands were playing Qatar in the other match – which ITV were showing on their main channel, while this altogether more consequential game was tucked away on ITV4 – but Qatar were already out and the Dutch only needed a point to qualify.
The Netherlands predictably won, inspired by Cody Gakpo and condemning Qatar to the ignominy of being the worst host nation in the history of the tournament.
But there was a lot more riding on this. Ecuador have previously reached the World Cup finals three times, Senegal twice, and both had got through the group stages once previously. But in this particular case Ecuador had the critical one-point advantage. Both teams beat a weak Qatar by two goals, but Ecuador came back to get a 1-1 draw from their game against the Netherlands while Senegal lost 2-0.
Ecuador also had one of the hottest goalscoring properties of the tournament after two matches. At the top of the Golden Boot list after two games were tied Kylian Mbappe and Enner Valencia, the latter having scored all three of Ecuador’s goals in this tournament.
A draw would have been perfectly satisfactory for them, but knowing what they had to lose seemed to inhibit Ecuador in a way that Senegal realising they needed to win seemed to set them free.
It took until shortly before half-time for their reward to reveal itself. Ismaila Sarr didn’t seem to be running anywhere particularly dangerous when Piero Hincapie clattered into the back of his leg, but there was little disputing that it was a penalty. Sarr stepped up to convert himself, sending Senegal in at half-time in second…
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