“I had to stay patient and try to have a cool head because everywhere else there was fire,” Édouard Mendy remembers. In the cauldron of the Stade Prince Moulay Abdellah in Rabat, the Senegal goalkeeper was about to face a penalty against the hosts, Morocco, in stoppage time of the Africa Cup of Nations final.
Mendy had just been shown a yellow card after a 17-minute delay where he and most of his teammates had controversially headed to their dressing room in protest at the referee’s decision to penalise El Hadji Malick Diouf after a Morocco corner.
