AL KHOR – Morocco’s coach Walid Regragui, said that his team was sad to leave Qatar, but proud to have made history as the first African team to make it to the World Cup semi-finals.

France beat Morocco 2-0 on Wednesday, and now Morocco and Croatia will play for third place while France plays Argentina in the final.

“We know we’ve already done a great job,” Regragui told reporters. “We know that the media, social media, and TV showed pictures of us and that everyone in our country was proud of us.

“We’re sad for the Moroccan people tonight. We wanted to keep the dream alive. But we’re happy with what we’ve done so far. We thought we could have gone even further, but these little things help real champions, as we saw tonight.”

Regragui told his team members he was proud of them.

“My players gave everything they had, and they’ve gone as far as they could. I really wanted to change history, but you can’t win the World Cup by doing miracles.”

– Walid Regragui

“His Majesty was proud, and so were the Moroccan people,” he said. “I think everyone in the world is proud of this Moroccan team because we work hard. We work hard, and we played football with honesty and hard work.

“I think we gave a good impression of Morocco and of African football, and that was important to us because we were representing our country and our continent.”

Morocco had the best defensive record in the tournament going into the game, but France scored on their first serious attack after five minutes.

“If I have regrets today, it’s just the beginning of the game,” Regragui said. “We got off to a bad start, and we gave up a goal very quickly, which was the turning point.

“They gave us a lot of things, but we made too many mistakes to be a problem for them.”

Regragui thought that his team got better after halftime.

“We made a lot of chances, but in the last third we didn’t take advantage of them,” he said.

“We did everything we could to score, but congrats to France. We’ll help them from now on.”

Morocco’s first-choice centre back Nayef Aguerd got hurt again in the warm-up, and their captain Romain Saiss got hurt in the first half and had to leave the field.

“Despite being hurt and tired, we pulled out all the stops and did everything we could,” Regragui said.

He was happy that his team had made things hard for France.

“But I think we fell short physically tonight. “We had too many players who were 60 or 70%, and they had been for a few games,” Regragui said.

“My players gave everything they had, and they’ve gone as far as they could. I really wanted to change history, but you can’t win the World Cup by doing miracles; you have to work hard. And that is what we will do.”

Info source – Reuters