Scotland have now appealed. The record reflects this.
Two incidents, one match, zero penalties awarded. John McGinn describes contact as having taken him out. Scott McTominay is involved in a separate appeal. Steve Clarke, post-match, characterises the calls as 50/50 and raises the question of whether a Moroccan player should have been reduced to ten men. Clarke does not condemn the officials. That restraint is, in its way, data.
Morocco win 1-0. The goal arrives in the second minute — Saibari, from a Díaz pass, after a Hanley lapse — and Scotland spend the remaining eighty-eight minutes in the administrative position of a side that requires something it cannot compel. They appeal for what the officials decline to give. This is not unusual. This is the ceremony.
The category assigned to this exit is Respectably Unlucky / Structural. The slash is doing work. Both halves are true simultaneously, and that is precisely where the problem lives.
Scotland's relationship with the un-given decision is long enough to have developed institutional memory. The 1978 campaign accumulated its own grievances in real time; the present match adds two entries to a taxonomy that was already extensive. What the taxonomy does not record — what it cannot, by its nature, record — is the point at which the grievance stopped being an injury and started being a fixture.
That point is worth locating, because something changes there.
A decision not given is an event. A pattern of decisions not given is evidence. But a national conviction that decisions will not be given — carried forward into every consequential match, rehearsed before the whistle, confirmed by the first appeal — is no longer a wound. It is a structural element. It holds the thing up.
Scotland have not organised a conspiracy against them. What they have organised, across decades of qualifying campaigns and group-stage exits, is a narrative in which the un-given decision explains the outcome. The narrative is not fabricated — the incidents are real, the contact is real, the appeals are legitimate. But the narrative has become self-completing. Scotland arrive at the decisive moment, the moment resists them, the grievance absorbs the loss, and the cycle resets with its load-bearing function intact.
The Disaster Index for this match is 6.8. That number reflects an exit that carries the texture of injustice without the proof of it. 50/50, Clarke says. That is an honest assessment. It is also, structurally, the worst possible answer: close enough to sustain the grievance, insufficient to resolve it.
Scotland now face Brazil on 24 June in Miami, the group effectively resolved. The penalty question does not travel with them. Brazil will present entirely different problems, and the register will record those separately.
What the register notes here is this: Scotland have lost two consecutive group matches. They appealed for two penalties against Morocco, neither given. The appeals were not unreasonable. The outcome was not engineered.
And yet the ceremony was performed exactly as before, down to the manager's measured post-match restraint, down to the contact described but not confirmed, down to the loss that requires an explanation the officials have declined to provide.
The record does not say Scotland were robbed. The record says Scotland have been here before.