Following Zlatko Dalic’s vehement complaints about the disallowed goal in stoppage time, it was Luka Modrić’s turn to protest the penalty kick that allowed Portugal to tie the game against Croatia. The 40-year-old midfielder rarely speaks out on such matters, but in what is likely to be the last World Cup of his career, he feels his team was blatantly wronged.
“Things have happened that seem unbelievable to me. It’s hard to talk about it now; I don’t want to say the wrong thing. VAR would never have been involved in the penalty calls if the circumstances had been reversed. When VAR was introduced, I said I didn’t like it. Later, it turned out that VAR is good for certain things, but they’re using it wrong—they’re being selective and judging based on the team’s stature. If a play is 200% clear, then VAR should intervene, but if it’s a gray area, there’s no reason for it to intervene. What was called wasn’t a penalty; it wasn’t just one player pulling—they were both holding onto each other and fell together. You can’t call a penalty like that in a game like this. That bothers me; we won’t complain about it, but it’s always to our detriment,” emphasized the Milan star.
ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ
“We didn’t put in our best performance in the first half, but we were amazing in the second. It was one of our best games. We could have wrapped it up earlier, but we didn’t, and we lost. But we can be proud of how we represented Croatia,” said Modrić, who declined to clarify whether he intends to retire from the Croatian national team.
*photo source: AP
