Gritty Croatia edges underdog Morocco to win World Cup third-place match
It made the impossible seem possible. And for people on two continents that was bigger than anything that“We were given a 1% change of winning the World Cup. Now we are one of the top four teams in the world,” Regragui said. “If you told me we would do that before the tournament, I would have accepted it straight away.“Every time we won a match and we saw the Morocco people taking to the streets, it stuck a chord for us.
Even as Morocco struggled to the finish line Saturday, limping exhausted and injured through its seventh game in 24 days, it never quit. Nor did its large and enthusiastic red-clad fan base, whose incessant whistling and choreographed chants became a big part of the soundtrack of this World Cup.“I would like to salute Morocco,” Croatia coach Zlatko Dalic said at the start of his postgame news conference. “It was a great fight they put up. They were tired, they were exhausted.
Four years ago Croatia made the final, the greatest achievement of a golden generation that played its final World Cup game Saturday. And fittingly Luka Modric and Ivan Perisic, the core of that generation, had a role in its final World Cup victory, teaming up on a well-designed set piece that ended with Josko Gvardiol heading in the game’s first goal in the seventh minute.
Modric, a former Ballon d’Or winner and Croatia’s all-time leader in appearances, sent a free kick toward the near post for Perisic, the team’s leading active goal scorer, who peeled away from his defender to head the ball back into the center of a box for Gvardiol, who nodded it in. The assist gave Perisic a hand in his 11th World Cup goal since 2014. Only Argentina’s Lionel Messi has been involved in more. And only Messi has played in as many World Cup games over that span as Modric, 37, and Perisic, 33, who were starting for the 17
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