Missing giants mean weaker Nations

EGYPT, winners of the last three tournaments, will not be there when the African Cup of Nations begins in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea in a fortnight. Neither will Cameroon, who won in 2000 and 2002.

Neither will South Africa, who won in 1996. And neither will Nigeria, who won in 1994.

Given Egypt also won in 1998, that means that of the winners of the last nine Cups of Nations, the only one to have made it to the finals this time round is Tunisia, champions on home soil in 2004.

The positive way to look at that is to celebrate the diversity, to see signs that football in Africa is growing, spreading so that it’s not only the traditional powers who can compete. That’s certainly the line Marcel Desailly took this week in his column for the website of the Ghanaian radio station Capital FM. “It is,” he said, “a misconception to assume that just because the likes of Egypt and Cameroon are absent, that the task will be any less difficult for Ghana or Cote d’Ivoire. Every nation present in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon is there on merit.”

Well, maybe. Botswana’s achievement in finishing top of a group that also included Tunisia using a squad composed primarily of home-based players is clearly laudable; other cases are more complex.

But even if by “on merit” Desailly meant nothing more than ‘everybody finished at the top of their groups (or as a best runner up) and so deserves to be there’, it’s far from a universal view. Namibia went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland yesterday to try to have Burkina Faso disqualified for fielding an ineligible player — Herve Zengue, who was born in Cote d’Ivoire and fulfils none of FIFA’s criteria to declare for another nation, although he is married to a Burkinabe woman. The African Football Confederation (CAF) twice dismissed Namibia’s appeal on technicalities over how the protest was lodged.

Besides, we’ve heard this argument of the widening base before. In 2006, when Angola, Togo, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire qualified for the World Cup for the first time. Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana have built on their success, and both qualified again four years later; Angola and Togo failed even to reach the 2008 Cup of Nations.

Botswana are one of three debutants. Equatorial Guinea are another, their purpose in co-hosting the competition presumably being to raise their profile internationally and to try to normalise their image seven years after the coup attempt against Tedoro Obiang led by the former SAS officer Simon Mann.

The third are Niger, their qualification encapsulating much of what is wrong with African football. On the final day of qualification, they were hammered 3-0 by Egypt, whose new coach Bob Bradley had deliberately left out a number of senior players so he could assess his squad. Egypt had already gone out, their form, not surprisingly, having deserted them during the uprising against Hosny Mubarak.

South Africa, playing Sierra Leone in Nelspruit, had complained about Bradley’s selection, but as word came through that Niger were losing, it meant both they and Sierra Leone needed a win to advance.

A draw meant a three-way tie and a head-to-head mini-group in which Niger had the best record. The problem was, nobody in the South African Football Association had bothered to work it out. Whether they thought goal difference was used to separate teams level on points or whether they looked simply at their head-to-head record against Niger without factoring in Sierra Leone isn’t clear, but South Africa thought a draw would be enough, and killed time to draw 0-0.

Their players did a lap of honour, Steven Pienaar sent a congratulatory tweet, television announced their qualification, and then somebody realised that Niger were celebrating in Cairo.

Slowly the dread truth dawned. South Africa responded truculently, threatening an appeal on the utterly spurious grounds that goal difference was used more widely elsewhere (which in international competition, isn’t even true). The truth, of course, was that incompetent administrators were lashing out, desperately looking for an excuse to cover their own negligence. So much for the legacy of the 2010 World Cup.

Nigeria’s departure wasn’t quite as farcical, but it wasn’t far off.

They led Guinea 2-1 with minutes of their final qualifier to go. That would have left them second in the group on goal difference, but — barring a freakish set of results in the groups to be played the following day — would have seen them through as one of the two best runners-up.

Instead they piled forward in search of a third goal that would have lifted them above Guinea, conceded on the break and went out. Again, the suspicion was that nobody had bothered to do the maths.

Of those past champions, only Cameroon, edged out by a resurgent Senegal inspired by the forward power of Demba Ba, Moussa Sow and Mamadou Niang, went out for footballing reasons. This is African football in microcosm: it doesn’t matter how many players they have at top European clubs if the basic support structure at home is so chaotic. It’s not just poor infrastructure; there’s a culture of corruption and disorganisation. Rational long-term planning simply doesn’t exist.

Equatorial Guinea appointed a new coach on Tuesday, Gilson Paulo replacing Henri Michel, who quit because of “interference from a third party”. Perhaps the fall of the giants and the rise of the rest really does herald a brave new future with a broad base of quality, but given the circumstances in which South Africa and Nigeria went out it seems more likely that there has been a slide to mediocrity. It may be time for Europe to reassess the narrative of progress it’s been projecting on African football since Cameroon’s World Cup quarter-final in 1990.