Al Nassr and Portugal’s award-winning forward Cristiano Ronaldo showed true sportsmanship as he asked the referee to cancel the awarded penalty during the mathc between Al Nassr and Persepolis in the AFC Champions League.
The incident occured when Ronaldo was awarded a penalty by Chinese referee Ma Ning, but Ronaldo went up to the referee and told him that the tackle wasn’t worthy enough of a penalty.
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Saud Arabia’s Al-Nassr and Iran’s Persepolis were competing in an AFC Champions League (ACL) match on Monday night when this event occurred.
Ronaldo went down in the 2nd minute of the match for the referee to award the penalty. Within seconds, Ronaldo held his hand up high and told the ref to change his decision, which the ref did after a consultation with VAR (Video Assistant Referee).
The match ended in a stalemate after Al-Nassr’s center-back Ali Lajami received a red card in the 17th minute of the match. Al-Nassr maintained 51% possession of the ball even after the red card.
One of the primary reason for this is that half of their team played in Europe’s elite league system in the previous season, and now they have started to play in Saudi Arabia.
The likes of Sadio Mane, Aymeric Laporte, Marcelo Brozovic and Otavio all played in the top-5 leagues of Europe till the last season, but now they represent Al-Nassr.
Al-Nassr have already qualified for the next round of the ACL, so this 0-0 result doesn’t have an impact on their qualification to the next round.
