Whole new ball game in Africa
That might not sound a particularly important statistic, but it augurs well for the European Championships in June. Two years ago, in Angola, there were no direct free-kicks scored and the goalkeeping was bewilderingly inept, leading to a load of semi-justifiable jokes about how bad African goalkeeping is. The difference? The ball.
The Comoeqa looks good, and it behaves superbly, without the cartoonish drift of the Jabulani that blighted both the 2010 Cup of Nations and the World Cup. It’s essentially the same ball as the Tango 12 that will be used in Ukraine and Poland, and that has to be good news. This is a ball that good players can control, that doesn’t suddenly dip on goalkeepers, and it has produced some excellent football.
For this has been an excellent Cup of Nations on almost every level.
The pitches were good. Even the one in Bata that heavy rain had pretty much submerged for the Equatorial Guinea against Senegal and the Zambia against Libya matches recovered well. The refereeing was generally top-class, the only major point of controversy coming in Senegal’s defeat to Equatorial Guinea when the Sudanese official Khalid Abdel Rahman declined to award Senegal a penalty for a trip by Lawrence Doe on Issiar Dia with the score at 0-0; had that been awarded and scored, then Senegal might have lived up to the early expectations.
The interpretation of the laws may have been on the liberal side, leading to some crunching challenges, but at least it was consistently so, and there were both remarkably few complaints and remarkably little time-wasting. Perhaps most impressive was the Gambian official Bakary Gassama who ignored the passionate home support and awarded a penalty to Morocco in the final minute of their game against Gabon when he had every excuse to rule that Charly Moussono had handled accidentally.
Perhaps there was no team quite in the class of Egypt in 2008 or Cameroon in 2000, but generally there was a spirit of freedom about the football and sense of sides who believed they could beat each other and weren’t relying on keeping things tight and striking on the break. The only downside was that perennial Cup of Nations problem, the attendances. When the hosts weren’t playing, crowds rarely rose above 2,000.
Ticket prices, perhaps, were to blame, with a cheapest fee of 5,000 francs (€7.60) clearly absurd when, according to EG Watch, 70% of the population lives on under €1.50 per day. But then, when so much of the population has no disposable income, any fee would probably be too much. Even when the gates were opened for free, as they were for the semi-finals, the crowd in Bata was only around 7,000 and a little over 10,000 in Libreville. Locals simply didn’t care.
This is simply the way Africans watch sport — in as much as such things can be generalised. Mark Gleeson, the doyen of African football journalism, admits he still finds it odd when he hears English cricket fans excitedly talking about just being at Newlands or the Wanderers; there is no equivalent desire to be there. The attitude is perhaps partly conditioned by a culture of watching the Champions League and top European domestic leagues on television in bars.
I asked one of the taxi drivers who took me to the stadium if he would go to the game, thinking that if he said he couldn’t afford it I’d buy him a ticket, but he pointed at a slab of beer on the back seat and said he was going to watch it on television with friends. That, for him, was preferable to going to the stadium. And of course hosting the tournament in countries that are difficult to get to and tough to obtain visas for, only exacerbates the problem. In Equatorial Guinea, there isn’t even a professional league, so there is no ingrained habit of going to matches.
Ruslan Obiang Nsue, the head of the local organising committee, spoke of negotiations between the national federation and the government to subsidise a new professional league, perhaps raising the standard by buying in Angolans, Senegalese and Cameroonians (much, the cynic may say, as they did with the national side), but there are major doubts as to whether that will happen.
But in a sense, those negatives we knew about; they haven’t come as a surprise. And in many other ways, things are improving. After the low of Angola 2010, this feels like a major step forwards.
