Ghana
PanamaGhana 1-0 Panama is the result football delivers routinely and cruelly: the team that commanded the ball failed to convert it, the team that looked lost found its footing through tactical adjustment, and a bundled finish in injury time decided everything. Queiroz read the game correctly and his double substitution on the hour was the decisive intervention — Thomas-Asante's directness and Fatawu's energy dragged Panama backward, opened the spaces, and Semenyo's combination play produced the cross that Yirenkyi converted on the stretch.
Ghana
Ghana laboured through a frustrating opening 45 minutes in which they registered zero shots on target and ceded 64 percent of the ball to Panama's tidy double pivot. Queiroz's response at the hour mark — Fatawu and Thomas-Asante on for Nuamah and Sulemana — injected exactly the pace and directness that had been missing, flipping the game's dynamic entirely. It was Thomas-Asante, released by Semenyo down the left, who crossed for Yirenkyi to bundle home in the fifth minute of stoppage time: scruffy, glorious, and entirely decisive.
Panama
Panama were the more composed side for the better part of ninety minutes, their double pivot anchoring the midfield and the back four holding their shape with textbook discipline. Without Carrasquilla to provide a creative outlet going forward, all that possession and structure produced no shot of genuine danger — and when Ghana's substitutions brought directness and chaos, Panama's defensive organisation frayed at precisely the wrong moment, ceding a stoppage-time sucker-punch that ended a performance which deserved, at minimum, a draw.