Walid Regragui has said the lengthy wait time before Morocco’s injury-time penalty “disturbed” Brahim Díaz and led to him having his panenka effort saved.
The hosts were given a contentious penalty in the eighth-minute of added time after VAR deemed that El Hadji Malick Diouf had fouled Díaz in the box. It led to a fracas between both sets of players and saw Senegal players walking off the pitch in protest on the instruction of their coach Pape Thiaw and came back on after a 14 minute delay.
In all, Díaz was made to wait 17 minutes before taking his penalty and ended up chipping it straight into Édouard Mendy’s hands.
Thiaw’s side eventually went on to win the final after Villarreal’s Pape Gueye scored the winner in the fourth minute of extra time.
It was a cruel end to Díaz’s tournament, with the Real Madrid forward winning the Golden Boot for his five goals.
“He had a lot of time before taking the penalty which must have disturbed him,” Regragui said.
“But we can’t change what happened. That is how he chose to take the penalty. We need to look forwards now.”
“The match we had was shameful for Africa,” he added.
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“When a head coach asks his players to leave the pitch, when he’s saying things that already started in the press conference [before the match, when Senegal accused Morocco of unsporting tactics] … he needs to stay class, in victory as well as in defeat.
“What Pape [Thiaw] did tonight doesn’t honor Africa. He’s an African champion now, so he can say what he wants, but they stopped the match for over 10 minutes.
“That doesn’t excuse Brahim for the way he hit [the penalty], he hit it like that and we have to own it. We need to look forward now, and accept that Brahim missed it.”
