Afcon’s unlikely semi-finalists carry weight of history

A tournament of extraordinary drama has thrown up two semi-finals that each match one of the continent’s current giants against a team that has distant memories of glory.

Neither South Africa nor Democratic Republic of the Congo arrived at the Africa Cup of Nations with especially elevated hopes but on Wednesday they face Nigeria and the hosts Ivory Coast respectively for a place in the final.

Ivory Coast, whose golden generation spent so long narrowly missing out on the trophy, are, like their opponents, looking to win the tournament for the third time. The difference is that it is 50 years since DRC last triumphed.

They were one of the early powers of African football, winning the tournament in 1968 and then again, as Zaire, in 1974, the year in which they became the first sub-Saharan African side to play at the World Cup.

That story, thanks to Mwepu Ilunga charging from the wall to belt away a free-kick, is all too well-known and, even if it is now fairly widely recognised that he was trying to waste time to stave off the sort of heavy defeat that might have brought recriminations from the Mobutu government, the sense of farce tends to overshadow just how good Congolese football was at the time.

TP Englebert (now TP Mazembe) appeared in four successive African Champions League finals between 1967 and 1970, enjoying a ferocious rivalry with the Ghanaian club Asante Kotoko. AS Vita of Kinshasa also lost to Kotoko in the final in 1973.

DRC has the 16th-highest population in the world. Given that, and such a proud history, three semi-final appearances in the past 50 years is thin gruel. Mobutu and his recognition of the value of sport, which led most famously to the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974, proved first a stimulus