FEB 14 — It’s fair to say that Premier League managers (and their counterparts in other major European leagues, I am sure) are not that keen on the African Cup of Nations. Not keen at all.
To be specific, it’s the timing of the event that is so irksome, rather than the tournament itself. Being forced to part ways with some of your most important players for up to a month, right in the middle of the season, is a major headache to the extent that many managers — including Sir Alex Ferguson — are now reluctant to sign African players.
The impact of this year’s tournament, which came to a conclusion with Zambia’s penalty shoot-out victory over the Ivory Coast on Sunday, was lessened by the fact that many leading nations, including Egypt, Algeria, Cameroon, Nigeria and South Africa, surprisingly failed to make it through the qualifying stages — perhaps a consequence of the reluctance of many European clubs to release their players for the qualifying fixtures.
And perhaps due to the absence of those high-profile nations, this year’s African Nations was a rather uninspiring event.
On the whole, African international football has made disappointing progress in the 20-odd years since Cameroon blasted their way onto the scene by beating reigning champions Argentina in the opening game of the 1990 World Cup finals.
Back then, pundits were falling over themselves to declare Africa as the next powerhouse of world football, with no less a luminary than Pele predicting that an African nation would win the World Cup before 2000. That, of course, failed to materialise, and in more recent years African football seems to have stagnated rather than progressed.
Even though the most recent finals were held in their own continent, only one African nation — Ghana — even made it into the knockout stages, with South Africa, Cameroon and Nigeria only registering a solitary victory between them before being dumped out in the group phase.
Ghana were unfortunate to suffer elimination in the quarterfinals against Uruguay (remember Luis Suarez’s last-minute handball on the line followed by Asamoah Gyan’s penalty miss?), so it’s possible to speculate that the Black Stars could have given the Netherlands a tough game in the next round and made it all the way to the final, but the fact still remains that no African team has ever reached the last four of a World Cup finals — never mind won the thing as Pele predicted.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the reasons why, because Africa has been a steady source of truly world-class performers over the last two decades: from George Weah and JJ Okocha through to Samuel Eto’o, the continent has produced far better players than its combined record at international level would suggest.
And, with countless highly promising young African players continuing to make waves at club level, there’s no sign of that production line abating. So it’s not the case that African players aren’t good enough, but somehow they fail to gel when they get together on the international stage.
If anything, I think Africa’s lack of progress could be explained by a collective identity crisis — when it comes to international football, they don’t seem to quite know who they are.
Back in the 1990s, African football was widely characterised as a feast of attacking abandon: they’re brilliant going forward, most observers opined, but they just can’t defend. And so, in an attempt to transform themselves into disciplined defensive units, a raft of defensive-minded European coaches were imported to impart their organisational abilities onto groups of players that were perceived — rightly or wrongly — as talented but lacking structure.
And now, perhaps, they’ve travelled too far in that direction, attempting to direct the players away from their natural instincts and losing the spontaneity and creativity that made the world sit up and take notice in the first place. Do African nations want to play like African teams? Or like European teams? At the moment, they don’t seem to know.
Three of the four teams to reach the semi-finals in the recently concluded tournament were coached by Europeans: Zambia and Mali were led by Frenchmen (Herve Renard and Alain Giresse respectively), and Ghana by a Serb (Goran Stevanovic).
Only the Ivory Coast, with the appointment of François Zahoui to replace that archetypal European rent-a-coach Sven Goran Eriksson, decided to buck the trend by appointing a native of their country.
But even they seemed focused on a defensive strategy, which worked to an extent because they reached the final without conceding a goal. But their lack of attacking intent ultimately undid their dreams as they failed to find a way past Zambia in the final and lost following the lottery of a penalty shoot-out — a fitting way to end a dreary, unadventurous tournament.
Maybe it’s time for African nations to return to the attacking principles that excited the footballing world more than two decades ago because, at international level, they seem to be going nowhere fast at the moment.
* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.
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