Zurich (DPA)
With the curtain coming down on the group stage activities of the Arab Cup, which is currently being held in Qatar, the FIFA website showed great interest in the activities of the first round of the tournament, which this time is accredited by FIFA.
Today, Wednesday, the FIFA website published a report on the most prominent features of the first round, especially the digital ones, and indicated that the Moroccan team continued its wonderful career that it presented over recent years, and presented distinctive and enjoyable performances in the tournament, and was the only one with the Qatari team in achieving the full mark in the first round of the tournament. Each of them won all three matches in their group.
FIFA also focused on the numbers and statistics in the first round confirming that the tournament is characterized by great enthusiasm, including goal statistics, as well as the yellow and red cards that the referees have made famous in the tournament matches so far.
FIFA indicated that the Moroccan team continued its distinguished career and won all three matches in its group in the first round of the Arab Cup, to maintain its record free of defeats in the last 31 consecutive matches played over 1267 consecutive days, with the exclusion of defeats through penalty shootouts.
The last defeat of the Moroccan national team was the “Atlas Lions” in an official match, when the team fell to its Portuguese counterpart, with the goal of the famous star Cristiano Ronaldo, in the group stage of the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
The Moroccan team topped the list of the most shocking teams in the first round, with nine goals, with an average of three goals per match. The Egyptian and Algerian teams came in second place with seven goals each, while the UAE team was the least scored among all the teams qualified for the second round, where it scored three goals. Just.
The Moroccan team was also the only one who kept a clean sheet in the first round of the tournament, thus confirming the strength of its defense line, which shook its net once during the six matches it played so far in the African qualifiers for the 2022 World Cup.
The Moroccan team will meet its Algerian counterpart in an exciting confrontation in the second round, “the quarter-finals” of the tournament, to be the match as an early final for the tournament in light of the strength of the two teams on Friday.
The activities of the first round witnessed 61 goals in 24 matches in the four groups of the tournament, bringing the average score in the group stage of the current edition of the tournament to 2.54 goals per match.
The top scorer in the first round of the tournament was Tunisian Seif El-Din Jaziri, with three goals, by which he raised his score with the Tunisian team “Carthage Eagles” in 2021 to seven goals.
Qatari Akram Afif and Omani Abdullah Fawaz topped the list of the best goal makers in the first round of the tournament, as they each made two goals.
The statistics of the yellow and red cards in the first round of the tournament confirmed the extent of this version of great enthusiasm, as the 24 matches in the first round witnessed 72 yellow cards, with an average of three yellow cards per match, and the tournament has witnessed so far 17 expulsions.
The Sudanese team topped the “black” list, as the activities of the first round witnessed the expulsion of three of the team’s players in the last two matches.
One of the most prominent features of the first round was the late goals of the Qatari team “Al Annabi”, where the team scored two thirds of its goals (four of the six goals it scored in the first round) after the 80th minute.
.