Cannavaro Has No Excuses Left After This Collapse
Congo beat Uzbekistan 3-1 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on June 28, 2026, in their final Group K match, sending Sebastien Desabre’s side into the round of 32 against England while ending Fabio Cannavaro’s tournament in the cruelest possible way. One team scored three goals in fifteen minutes. The other team simply stopped playing.
That sentence should not be possible. It happened anyway.
Eldor Shomurodov gave Uzbekistan the lead in the 10th minute with a lobbed finish off a defensive mix-up, the kind of moment that should have set up a backs-to-the-wall defensive masterclass for a side already eliminated from group play. Instead, Congo equalized through a 68th-minute Yoane Wissa penalty, Fiston Mayele turned a deflected shot home in the 78th, and Wissa added a curling finish in stoppage time. Congo finished with 2.18 expected goals to Uzbekistan’s 0.20. That is not a team that got unlucky. That is a team that disappeared.
Here is the decision that gets Desabre through to face England with his credibility fully intact: the triple substitution in the 72nd minute.
Bringing on Theo Bongonda, Meschack Elia, and Ngal’ayel Mukau all at once is a high-risk move that can unsettle a team’s shape just as easily as it can spark one. Desabre made it anyway, with the scoreline still level and his side staring down a must-win must-score scenario. Elia, on for less than ten minutes, set up Mayele’s go-ahead goal and then assisted Wissa’s third in stoppage time. Two substitutes combined directly for two goals. That is not luck. That is a manager identifying that his front line had run out of ideas and acting on it instantly rather than waiting for a natural pause in play.
Now for the decision that will define Cannavaro’s tournament long after this result fades from memory.
Cannavaro’s logic in making his own double change in the 82nd minute, bringing on Igor Sergeev and Jamshid Iskanderov to chase an equalizer, was not unreasonable on its face. Uzbekistan needed a goal and fresh legs up front made sense in theory. The trouble is that by the 82nd minute, his team had already conceded twice in the previous fourteen minutes and shown zero defensive organization to build fresh legs around. Sending more players forward without first stabilizing the back four only opened more space for Congo’s substitutes to exploit, and Wissa’s stoppage-time strike from 20 yards arrived through exactly the kind of gap an unbalanced, chasing team leaves behind.
The stat that follows Cannavaro out of this tournament is brutal in its simplicity. Uzbekistan conceded three goals in the final fifteen minutes of this match, a collapse matched by only one other team across the entire group stage. Eliminated before kickoff or not, a team representing its country at a World Cup owes its supporters more resistance than that in the closing stages.
Make no mistake, this was not a fluke. It was a pattern. Uzbekistan finish the tournament without a single point and a minus-nine goal difference, the worst of any team in the competition.
Desabre does not escape entirely clean either. Congo needed a penalty, a deflection, and a moment of late individual quality from Wissa to turn this match around, and they trailed for 58 minutes against a side already mathematically dead in the group. The challenge now is considerably sharper. England await in the round of 32, and they will not gift Congo the same slow, disorganized opponent that handed this game away in the final quarter hour.
There is no job at risk here. Cannavaro’s side were already heading home regardless of tonight’s result, and Uzbekistan’s federation will judge the qualifying campaign as a whole rather than one final defeat. Still, a manager who watches his team fold this completely with nothing left to lose has questions to answer about what his players believed they were playing for. Desabre leaves Atlanta with the stronger position by every possible measure: a historic first knockout appearance, a bench that delivered when summoned, and a result built on substance rather than fortune alone.