Croatia offsides erased a 103rd-minute equalizer against Portugal in Toronto on Thursday, July 2. Joško Gvardiol turned in the loose ball after a frantic goal-mouth scramble, but VAR ruled the finish offside and Portugal held on for a 2-1 win.
Gonçalo Ramos had put Portugal ahead in the 94th minute, and Croatia was trying to answer deep into 10 minutes of stoppage time. The goal would have pulled the match level in the World Cup round of 32, but the review stopped that moment from counting.
Gvardiol and Mario in the scramble
The sequence started with Ivan Perišić sending a long cross from the right. The ball ran through a crowd of players, bounced off Renato Veiga's head, and then deflected off Mario Pašalić near the goal before Gvardiol turned it home. In real time it looked like Croatia had found the equalizer.
VAR saw a different frame in the chain. Igor Matanović got the faintest of headed touches on the ball, and Pašalić was already in an offside position when that touch occurred. That is the split that changed the ruling: once the touch was treated as the relevant contact, the offside line moved to that moment instead of the finish.
Portugal in the round of 16
That decision left Portugal with the 2-1 result and sent it into the round of 16. For Croatia, the chance to level the match vanished on the final touch, not on the finish itself.
The play is a clean example of how a scramble can turn on one incidental header. The ball crossed several bodies, but the ruling came down to the sequence of deflections and the position of Pašalić when Matanović made contact, not just to where Gvardiol put the ball.
