Qatar vs Ecuador LIVE: World Cup 2022 result, final score and reaction as Enner Valencia double downs hosts

The opening ceremony of the World Cup will take place on Sunday November 20th, ahead of the opening Group A match between hosts Qatar and Ecuador.

The opening ceremony is scheduled to begin at 2pm GMT.

The original plan was for the opening ceremony to be held before Qatar’s first game on November 21st, which would have created the unusual situation of two games being held before it. However, the opening match was then brought forward by a day.

Ecuador president Guillermo Lasso said he will not attend his nation’s high-profile opening match against Qatar, citing domestic unrest.

Qatar coach Felix Sanchez believes the World Cup can be a force for good as he described the deaths of migrant workers as a “tragedy” on the eve of his side’s opening game.

Qatar has come under intense scrutiny over the organisation of the tournament, in particular the conditions endured by migrant workers who have built the infrastructure needed to stage it.

In February 2021, the Guardian reported that 6,500 labourers had died in Qatar since it was awarded the World Cup. Authorities dispute the figure and say accident records show there were 37 deaths among workers between 2014 and 2020, three of which were “work-related”.

Arsenal’s GayGooners supporters group have called on FIFA to make the 2022 World Cup the last to take place in a country that persecutes members of the LGBTQ+ community.

The group held a protest outside the Qatar embassy in London on Saturday at the same time as FIFA president Gianni Infantino was hosting a media conference defending the decision to take the finals to the Middle East.

Qatar’s treatment of migrant workers and the LGBTQ+ community has been heavily criticised, with the issues raised only coming more to the fore as tournament kick-off approaches.

Qatar will kick-off the 2022 World Cup against Group A rivals Ecuador on Sunday.

It may only be the first game of the tournament but it could be crucial, given the challenge ahead for these two sides. Netherlands and African champions Senegal await, and that means defeat in this first match could well be terminal for Qatar or Ecuador.

The build-up to the tournament has been dominated by Qatar’s abuse of the migrant workers who built the stadiums and infrastructure over the past decade so that the World Cup could go ahead, on top of concerns around the safety of LGBTQ+ football fans in a conservative Islamic nation where male homosexuality is still illegal.

Both Fifa and Qatari organisers will be hoping the football can now fill the spotlight, but there is unlikely to be any let up from global scrutiny.

Here is everything you need to know as the World Cup gets under way:

Protests have broken out in London over the controversial World Cup hosts Qatar and their shocking record of human rights abuses.

The protests also cover Iran’s involvement in the tournament following a popular uprising against the Iranian republic and the rumours of mass executions.

When Qatar hit rock bottom, it might have been an irrelevant detail. Until, a few weeks in 2010 after they reached their lowest world ranking of 113th, they were awarded the 2022 World Cup. If much of the focus in the subsequent 12 years has concerned the off-field issues that rendered Qatar a controversial choice as hosts, on the pitch they risked embarrassment.

When they kick off against Ecuador on Sunday, it is with an altogether better pedigree. Qatar have won their last five games, albeit against teams who have not qualified for the World Cup. For the first time, they won the Asian Cup in 2019. They were Gold Cup semi-finalists in 2021. As the Qatari league paused in September, they have had longer to prepare than anyone else. Some of it has been spent at a training camp in Marbella. Some of their summer involved playing friendlies against European club sides.

“Qatar go into this tournament with an organised and well-drilled squad who are familiar with the stadiums, heat and landscape of the country,” noted Neil McGuinness, who previously worked for the Qatar FA and Aspire Academy on the identification and selection of players ahead of the World Cup.

The Doha Metro is one of the engineering jewels of Qatar, a $36bn (£32bn) ultra-modern transport system, speeding people around the Gulf state’s glass-towered futurescape capital and beyond. Usually it can be used to move between restaurants in the formerly run-down Msheireb district, or five-star hotels in Doha’s well-heeled West Bay.

But for the next few weeks, tens of thousands of football fans will use it to get to each of the eight stadiums of the Qatar World Cup, from Al Janoub in the south to Al Bayt in the north.

It spans 76km (47 miles), has 37 stations, and is perhaps the single greatest symbol of how Qatar’s staggering wealth and ambition has helped to utterly transform the country in the past few years.

The incredible transformation of Qatar has been in readiness for the World Cup. No country has ever been so physically changed just to hold a football tournament.

On Sunday at Al Bayt Stadium, Gianni Infantino will be more than willing to share the spotlight with the Emir of Qatar, but it isn’t a privilege the newly re-elected Fifa president affords many. Take a story from a few weeks ago. With the World Cup 2022 so close, the Lisbon-based Web Summit wanted both Arsene Wenger and Infantino to come and do a talk. Negotiations broke down for a few reasons, but one element raises a chuckle from those with knowledge of the talks. There was a request for Infantino to have a more prominent speaking slot than Wenger.

The story does tally with a common refrain from a lot of people you speak to about Infantino.

“It’s all about him.”

There was then whatever that World Cup opening press conference was. Infantino surpassed himself as well as Sepp Blatter with a cascade of frankly astonishing statements. The Fifa president attempted a statesman’s address but essentially just showed why the game is in the state it is. You could joke it was the biggest miss to open a World Cup since Diana Ross’s penalty, except the truth is so many of the issues he blithely glossed over are so serious, from the conditions of migrant workers to LGBTQ+ concerns in Qatar.

Out of the many facts and figures circulated about Qatar’s problems, there is one realisation that should stand above everything. It is a disgrace that, in 2022, a country can host a World Cup where it has lured millions of people from the poorest countries on earth - often under false pretences - and then forced them into what many call “modern slavery”.

And yet this has just been accepted. The World Cup carries on, an end product of a structure that is at once Orwellian and Kafkaesque. A huge underclass of people work in an autocratic surveillance state, amid an interconnected network of issues that make it almost impossible to escape. “It’s all so embedded,” says Michael Page of Human Rights Watch.

Many will point to similar problems in the west but this isn’t the failure of a system. It is the system, global inequality taken to an extreme. “The bottom line is that these human rights abuses are not normal for a World Cup host,” says Minky Worden, also of Human Rights Watch.

After all the controversy, the 2022 World Cup finally gets under way in Qatar on Sunday, when the hosts face Ecuador.

Fifa president Gianni Infantino had taken centre stage on Saturday during an extraordinary hour-long monologue in a pre-tournament press conference.

Qatar coach Felix Sanchez, meanwhile, is hoping for the best when the Gulf nation make their World Cup debut in Al Khor, while there was a late injury blow for France, with Ballon d’Or winner Karim Benzema ruled out of the tournament.

Here ’s a look back at Saturday’s events at the 2022 World Cup and ahead to Sunday’s action: