Prudence may yet pay in sparkling festival of football

THIS has been the tournament that restored the glee to the Cup of Nations.

The supposed attacking flair of African football has been a myth for over a decade now. Although you could make a case for the tournament in Ghana in 2008, which yielded 99 goals in 32 games, at least part of that was down to thrashings handed out to Namibia, Benin and Guinea at various stages; it didn’t have the end-to-end thrill-a-minute feel of this tournament.

Much has been written expressing reservations about the suitability of Gabon and Equatorial Guinea to host the tournament, but those doubts melted away, temporarily at least, last week. Equatorial Guinea, pummelled by Senegal, but somehow still standing, took the lead just after the hour, conceded an equaliser in the 90th minute, and then scored a winner with a brilliant, swerving 25-yarder from Kily deep in injury-time. A player from the fourth division scoring a goal like that in those circumstances to take his side to the quarter-final? That’s why sport makes for awful films: this was too ludicrous to be credible, and yet it happened, and prompted scenes of astonishing celebration.