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The last day of the Serie B football championship was played on May 19 with ten matches, all at the same time. The last playoff qualifiers, the last direct relegation to Serie C and the two teams qualified for the playout had to be decided. Among those who could still avoid direct relegation was Perugia, which in order to qualify for the playout would have had to beat Benevento and hope for a defeat by Brescia in Palermo.
However, Perugia had started their game badly, going behind after half an hour. In the second half he had managed to come back by scoring two goals in the space of a few minutes, but in the final minutes Benevento had equalized despite playing in ten for the previous expulsion of one of their defenders.
In Palermo the result was 2-2, therefore unfavorable for Perugia, but in the final minutes only one goal from Palermo, which could still hope to qualify for the playoffs, could have changed things. However, Perugia had to win their match, and they did so by scoring the goal of the final 3-2 in the fourth minute of added time of the seven decided by the referee. However, he marked him in a way that attracted several suspicions.
From a short clearance by the goalkeeper, defender Maxime Leverbe touched the ball very weakly towards a teammate further back towards his goal. In that way the ball was easily intercepted by Perugia midfielder Christian Kouan, who was already running up: from the video it seems that Leverbe himself saw Kouan arrive, before making the pass back. In fact, with that oversized pass, the Benevento defender put the ball at the disposal of Kouan, who easily scored the 3-2 goal in an empty net (the goalkeeper had remained in a lateral position with respect to the goal).
In the end, the victory didn’t help, because Palermo-Brescia ended in a draw, but the suspicions remained. The Prosecutor’s Office of the Football Association opened an investigation into a possible sporting offense: the hypothesis is that someone between the two teams somehow “prepared” the situation that led to Kouan’s goal, even if this didn’t help.
At the end of the match, the Benevento coach, Andrea Agostinelli, had spoken of the third goal conceded by saying: «We come out beaten from a match that we deserved much more than Perugia, and for what? Out of superficiality, but probably also for people who don’t like knitting and don’t like this job». This week, on Messenger, Perugia’s lawyer, Edoardo Chiacchio, commented: «Someone must have made a complaint, but we have no fears. It was a technical error like hundreds do, even at the highest levels».
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2023-05-26 08:40:46
#goal #investigated #prosecutor #Football #Federation
