Morocco goalkeeper’s career could have followed a very different trajectory but for a timely VAR intervention
Video Assistant Referee Changed My Life. It’s not the most likely headline, but in Yassine “Bono” Bounou’s case it’s true. “Everyone is talking about him now,” Julen Lopetegui says. Two years ago, the Wolves and former Sevilla manager knows, plenty were talking about him too, just not for the right reason. Luckily, every now and then the VAR does something that suggests it’s not completely awful, and this was one of those times. That night, it rescued the man who has ended up rescuing Morocco, en route to making World Cup history.
It was February 2020, the Europa League round of 32. With a minute remaining against Cluj a fairly tame shot slipped under Bono’s body and into the net. Sevilla were out and so, in all probability, was he. Signed on loan from Girona, Bono was back up to Tomas Vaclik. He had played just 45 minutes in the league and two Copa del Rey games against fourth-tier opposition. The Europa League was his competition and, amidst whistles and tension, that had gone. So had he: that option to buy wouldn’t be taken up now.
