‘Vahid Out’: Moroccan Fans Want Coach Gone After AFCON Disappointment

Agadir – For nearly three years, Moroccan media outlets and fans of Morocco’s Atlas Lions have had their say about hiring Vahid Halilhodzic as head coach. Now, with Morocco’s exit from AFCON, opinions and predictions about his role are flaring up across the web.

The general consensus on the Atlas Lions’ loss to the Egyptian Pharaohs in the AFCON quarter-finals is that the team was good enough, though lacking, and the coach is inappropriate for Morocco.

An Instagram comment by iamadmel succinctly sums up popular opinions: “As we all saw against Egypt, group abilities and young talents are not enough, you need champions and a technical leader to complete the team! Morocco lacked a real leader, Egypt had a modest team, yet they could count on Mo Salah. Vahid is a good coach but not the right coach for the Moroccan team .. names line Regragui or Renard sound more accurate regarding the potential of the team!”

Potential leaders Hakim Ziyech and Noussair Mazraoui’s absence from the lineup remained Halilhodzic’s most incredulous choice to many. With the benefit of hindsight, analyst Samir Bennis argued in a recent article that, because Halilhodzic’s “toxic stubbornness” cost the Moroccan team two of its best and most reliable players, Morocco’s AFCON debacle was not that surprising.

“Mazroui and Ziyech were undroppable players in a Moroccan team that badly needed — as we saw in the defeat against Egypt — a difference-making attacking midfield and a more reassuring left-back,” Bennis wrote.

But other commenters are siding with Halilhodzic regarding Ziyech’s apparent self-centeredness and lack of discipline. “Removing Ziyech was Vahid’s best decision,” one reader reacted to an article in which the author had trashed Halilhodzic’s coaching and asked for the Franco-Bosnian to be sacked.

Before resorting to insults, the reader adds, “Can someone remind me of his [Ziyech’s] stats with the national team? Clearly, he [Ziyech] does not respect the [national team] and had the same discipline problem with Renard before. And you want him back?”

Extreme, immediate measures?

One of the original concerns about bringing on the Bosnian coach was that Morocco needed an inside man with intrinsic knowledge of his players. Many people did not want another European on the backs of Moroccan tax dirhams. They were ready for “the end of the dominance of “white wizards’, those glamorous and expensive foreign coaches seemingly paid to perform miracles with African teams.”

This sentiment against hiring Halilhodzic is now regarded as “grotesque management mistakes.”

On the official Facebook account of Morocco National Football Team, reader Khalid Fidel insists, “We must change everything in this team both the tech staff and the players. It’s abnormal that there was so much trash at this level. It’s unacceptable, it’s not serious at all. Without Hakimi and Boufal and Saiss the team doesn’t stand… Vahid out. We need a [expletive] MOROCCAN coach…we’re tired of taking foreigners’ pity.”

In Halilhodzic’s four-year agreement with Moroccan football’s governing body, the coach had two missions: to qualify the Atlas Lions for the semi-finals of CAN 2021 and qualify for the 2022 World Cup. The suggestion being that failing at either should be enough as cause for immediate termination of the contract.

Having failed to reach the AFCON semifinals, Halilhodzic can technically be sacked at any moment. But some fans going against the predominant mood say that it is “simplistic” and wrong to be calling for the coach to be sacked because of just one mediocre performance in a two-year stint in which the team appeared to be more disciplined and more competitive.

Calling for patience, one commenter said: “Fire Vahid? What for? Too simplistic speech. It’s too easy to question everything and to wish the coach to leave during an elimination. As if football were an exact science. And from experience, it never made things better.”

Morocco has not won at AFCON in 46 years, and the Atlas Lions have not reached the semifinal stage in 18 years. As Morocco strives to put an end to a long-running cycle of near-misses and incomprehensible failures, the question for many fans and Moroccan sports analysts is whether now is the right moment for the FRMF to part ways with Halilhodzic.

By and large, the overwhelming mood is that Halilhodzic is not the kind of coach to take Morocco to continental glory and a good or proud World Cup performance. Still, some patience-friendly and stability-loving fans appear to be convinced that the Bosnian coach’s record with Morocco cannot be sniffed at.

For proponents of the less popular stability-embracing camp, the lack of difference-making players, and not the coach’s lack of tactical nous, was the main reason Morocco was ultimately unable to get the better of a Salah-inspired Egypt. While Egypt had Salah to count on in crucial moments, Moroccan players made amateurish mistakes like the comedy of a free kick in the final minutes of the match.

But then again, Samir Bennis rightly asked, “Why replace Boufal that early when he was Morocco’s most creative attacking player? Why start with Barkok and El Haddadi? Why did the coach not tell his players to continue with technical and possession football despite scoring early? Why did Morocco choose to play defensive football for much of the game, and only woke up when the match was already slipping away from them?”

For Bennis, the answer to all these questions is very simple: Halilhodzic is just “not the coach Morocco needs.” While Le306’s verdict on yet another AFCON debacle is the same as Bennis’s — the coach must go — the Moroccan newspaper appeared to concede that the Bosnian is not, in fact, a bad or mediocre coach.

But, it noted, “When one loses, one is always wrong, coach Vahid.” The conclusion appears self-evident, then: Because Vahid lost the very game he should have won to uphold the terms of his contract — reaching an AFCON semi final — and win the hearts and minds of millions of Moroccan fans for whom the national team means the world, the FRMF should look for another coach.