The referee was the talking point as Croatia beat Morocco in the bronze medal at the World Cup with a 2-1 win on Saturday afternoon.
Abdulrahman Al-Jassim caused outrage on social media after failing to award a penalty deep in the second half for Croatian defender Josko Gvardiol when he was brought down in the box by Liverpool-linked Sofyan Amrabat.
The Qatari official was in charge when Liverpool won the FIFA Club World Cup in December 2019 in theKhalifa International Stadium thanks to a Roberto Firmino goal in extra-time.
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A diving header for the highly-rated Gvardiol opened the scoring early in the first half before Achraf Dari equalised just minutes later. Mislav Orsic scored a superb goal as Croatia finished third in the World Cup.
Spectators of the match were in disbelief when the referee failed to award a penalty when Gvardiol was felled. VAR took a look at the incident, but saw nothing wrong.
"Seems to be a consistent theme of major international tournaments that VAR interventions drastically reduce - to the point of near irrelevance - for knockout matches. The unofficial policy appears to change notably from earlier rounds of tournament," said journalist Colin Millar on Twitter.
A number of sides in the World Cup have complained about the standard of refereeing in their games.
"On referees - Morocco, Croatia, Argentina and Holland have all come out of recent games claiming refs were biased against them (h/t @michieldehoog ). Always same method: highlight ref calls that went against them. Problem: they somehow forget ref calls that went against opponents."
One fan took to Twitter to describe the incident as a "shambles": "VAR is absolutely unnecessary with cases like this. Shambles."
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