France, the favourites to win Euro 2020, were knocked out last night when Kylian Mbappé missed a penalty. After 90 minutes playing as a team - plus 30 minutes of ‘extra time’ - it seems like an unsatisfactory way to decide a sporting contest. And, for the player concerned, that penalty miss will remain on his footballing CV for ever.
The France captain, Hugo Lloris, tried to share the load. “We win together, we lose together”, he said. “We are all responsible for being eliminated at this stage of the competition”. In a short statement on Twitter, Mbappé was perhaps more realistic. “It is very difficult to turn the page. I am sorry for this penalty. I wanted to help the team but I failed. Finding sleep will be difficult, but unfortunately those are the risks of the sport that I love so much”.
His misgivings are not without foundation. During a game in the 1994 World Cup, a Colombian player, Andres Escobar, inadvertently scored an own goal, which ended Colombia’s run in the competition. A few weeks later, as he left a nightclub in his home town of Medellin, Escobar was mocked by two men about the own goal, who then shot and killed him. And there are probably more trigger-happy nutters around in 2021 than there were back in 1994.
Licenced today: a Land Rover dealership in Shrewsbury...
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