Ivory Coast’s Afcon win shows there’s no blueprint for tournament success
It was the biggest defeat a tournament host of the Africa Cup of Nations had ever suffered. Ivory Coast fell apart utterly in the second half of their final group game against Equatorial Guinea. If they’d retained a sense of perspective, they’d have realised that even a one- or two-goal defeat was likely to be enough to see them through, but their heads were gone and Emilio Nsue kept scoring the same goal. It finished 4-0, the largest defeat for any major tournament host since Brazil’s 7-1 capitulation against Germany in the 2014 World Cup semi-final, and that made progress improbable.
The past three weeks have been the story of what followed. There was some low-key rioting, with cars and shops burned out. Ivory Coast’s 70-year-old French coach Jean-Louis Gasset was sacked. On his 40th birthday, the former Reading midfielder Emerse Faé was appointed, having never been a head coach before. He had no idea whether he’d have any matches to take charge of. But Ghana conceded twice in injury-time against Mozambique, Zambia lost to Morocco and Ivory Coast made it to the last 16 not so much through the back door, as up the tree and through the bathroom window.
With the country joking about their team of revenants, those who have returned from the dead, Faé then oversaw a series of improbable comebacks, culminating in Sunday’s 2-1 won over Nigeria, when the winner was scored by Sébastien Haller, who 18 months ago was diagnosed with testicular cancer. How much narrative does a tournament need? I was in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon for Zambia’s emotion-drenched triumph in 2012 (see On This Day) and nothing will ever be greater than that, but this, in its preposterousness, came close as the hosts went from embarrassment to disbelief
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