Referee Ilgiz Tantashev has explained himself. This is, by the standards of the institution he represents, exceptional. When Neil El Aynaoui challenged John McGinn inside the Morocco penalty area during what was, at that point in the match, Scotland's most meaningful approach of a goalless passage of play, Tantashev declined the appeal. His reasoning: the ball was already travelling out of play at the moment of contact. The challenge, by this logic, was irrelevant to the outcome. The outcome was already decided by geometry.
Stephen McGinn, John's brother, has since confirmed the explanation publicly. He now carries it. So does the record.
The explanation is technically defensible. Trajectory is a legitimate criterion. If the ball is leaving play, the foul — even if a foul occurred — produces no outcome that the law is obliged to protect. The referee's reasoning holds under examination. This is precisely the problem.
An explanation that holds under examination has not, on this occasion, produced the feeling that examination should produce. The grievance has not been dismissed. It has been categorised. What Scotland supporters experienced in real time — the appeal, the wave of the hand, the continuation of a match Scotland were losing — has now been processed through an institutional framework and returned to them correctly labelled. Here is your complaint. Here is why it does not qualify. Please retain for your records.
Scotland have accumulated a body of such records. The law and the outcome, as this publication has noted before, have not always been on speaking terms in Scotland's direction, nor against it — but the moments that persist in the collective ledger are the ones where the decision was correct and the result felt crooked. Correctness, in these cases, does not close the file. It files it.
What Tantashev has done, by explaining himself, is formalise the grievance rather than resolve it. A dismissed appeal leaves room for doubt — perhaps the referee simply missed it, perhaps a different official sees it differently, perhaps the angle was wrong. A dismissed appeal with a rationale attached leaves no such room. The door that uncertainty might have opened has been measured, documented, and confirmed to be the correct width for the corridor it serves.
Scotland lost to Morocco 1-0. Ismael Saibari scored in what the official record logs as the second minute, from a Brahim Díaz pass, after a defensive lapse from Grant Hanley. That goal stood without dispute. The penalty appeal did not result in a penalty. That non-event now has a reason attached to it, delivered through a brother, stored in the public record.
The decision stands. The geometry has been noted. Scotland face Brazil on 24 June in Miami, where the group's remaining arithmetic will be applied to what the previous two fixtures have left.
The ball, Tantashev has confirmed, was going out.