For the second World Cup in a row, Uruguay go home after the group stage. Last time it was on goals scored and with a sense of what might have been, but there was nothing to mitigate this campaign. The second-half performance against Saudi Arabia offered an idea of how they might have played, but this was a tournament characterised by ill feeling between coach and players, and undermined by individual errors.
It ended disgracefully with a terrible foul by Agustín Canobbio for which he was rightly sent off. Even his wild-eyed fury, though, signalled in two altercations with the referee in the minutes immediately before his inexcusable lunge on Pau Cubarsí, could not displace Fernando Muslera’s despairing glance behind him as the ball dribbled inside his right-hand post as the image of Uruguay’s World Cup.
