AL KHOR (Doha): The drums kept on beating. The whistles kept on shrieking. Morocco’s players kept on coming, again and again, their legs burning and their lungs heaving, as they raged against the dying of the light. At the end, Morocco had run out of road. At no point, not for a second, did it run out of fight.
The World Cup, then, will culminate in the sort of blockbuster final that both FIFA and hosts Qatar have craved: Lionel Messi’s Argentina against Kylian Mbappe, his heir apparent, and France.
Regardless of which team emerges triumphant on Sunday, though, which story line is reverse-engineered as destiny, on some level this will always be Morocco’s World Cup, the one that made it a trailblazer, a record-breaker, a watermark that will not fade.
From this point on, a whole slew of achievements will all be the first since Morocco. It was here that Morocco became the first team from the Arab world to make a World Cup quarterfinal. Then, a few days later, it was here that it became the first African team to extend its run all the way to the semifinals.
That it could go no further, beaten by France, 2-0, in a breathless, furious game, neither erases nor diminishes those feats. It does not alter the fact that it was in Qatar where Morocco proved to a “whole generation” that it could produce “miracles,” as its redoubtable goalkeeper, Yassine Bounou, put it. It was in Qatar that Morocco, according to its coach, Walid Regragui, redefined the limits of “what was possible.”
If it had needed confirmation of that, it came not long after Randal Kolo Muani doubled France’s lead, effectively sealing their place in the final, breaking hearts not just in Morocco but from Agadir to Amman and Cairo to Cape Town, all of those recent adopters who had adopted Regragui’s team as their standard-bearer.
For a moment, the tens of thousands of Moroccan fans who had packed this stadium, this city stood silent, collecting their thoughts. On the field, their players seemed winded.
It did not last long. Slowly, the crowd started to applaud, and then cheer, and then roar, a wave crashing and rebounding around the stadium, gathering strength and fervour, an outpouring of all the gratitude and pride that Morocco has generated over these past 3-1/2 weeks, that had swept them out of the group stage and all the way to the final four, to the cusp of smashing the biggest glass ceiling of all.
Even then, Morocco did not seem overawed. They did not wilt against the lustre, the experience, the contradictions of this curious French team, simultaneously obviously flawed and smoothly imperious.
Morocco did not stutter when a single misjudgment, a little excessive zeal from central defender Jawad El Yamiq, allowed France to prise an opening goal after only five minutes. It was the first goal Morocco had conceded to an opponent since the start of the World Cup.
At the final whistle, Regragui’s players collapsed on to their backs, all of the air drawn from them. For a while, it was possible to wonder if the tireless Azzedine Ounahi and Sofyan Amrabat, in particular, might need to spend the night there, and make their way home in the morning.
After a while, they lifted themselves and formed, for a few minutes, a tight huddle with their teammates. This, then, is where it ends.
In the weeks, and months, and years to come, though, that is not how Morocco, or Africa, or all of those countries that have seen in Morocco a reflection of themselves will see it. This World Cup, Morocco’s World Cup, will be remembered, instead, as a beginning.
