While the clash between Al-Wakrah and Al-Sadd was being played this Sunday (0-0), the match was interrupted by the irruption onto the pitch of the president of the local club, Sheikh Khalifa bin Hassan Al-Thani.
It was a top match day this Sunday for the Qatar Stars League, as the second in the standings hosted the leader of the Qatari first division championship. With four points behind before the start of the match, the locals hoped to win to reduce the gap with their opponent as much as possible. They didn’t succeed, but with the final draw (0-0), they still limited the damage. But it is not the game itself that the supporters present at the Al Janoub stadium will remember.
As the referee had just indicated the penalty spot, giving the visitors a golden opportunity to take the lead, a man entered the field to voice his displeasure. Chairman of Al Wakrah, Sheikh Khalifa bin Hassan Al-Thani came down to the lawn, intending to speak his mind to the man with the whistle. A sequence which lasted several minutes and which ended up disrupting the penalty taker.
A president on the pitch… in the middle of a match
Because this famous penalty was maintained by the referee, despite the expressions of anger from the sheikh. But the shooter, Akram Afif, missed the opportunity to open the score. In any case, this index inevitably reminded some of the episode broadcast on mondiovision during the 1982 World Cup match between France and Kuwait. That day, Sheikh Fahad al-Ahmed al-Jaber al-Sabah, president of the Kuwaiti Football Federation and the Kuwaiti Olympic Committee, went onto the pitch in the middle of the match to contest a goal awarded by the referee then that a whistle from the stands had disturbed his players before Alain Giresse scored.
Faced with pressure, the referee backpedaled and canceled the goal, logically provoking the fury of the French coach at the time, Michel Hidalgo. Although they led at this point in the match with a score of 3-0, the Blues finally won with a score of 4-1. But the ridge never passed. Subsequently, the man in black who officiated that day will be banned for life by FIFA. The sheikh met a disastrous end, killed in 1990 by Saddam Hussein’s men, during Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
