The Traditional Teams Advance in African Nations' Cup 2010

The performances by the various teams in the ongoing African nations' cup in Angola have been wonderful. So far only two of the traditional teams (Mali and Tunisia) have been knocked out of the competition and they were knocked out by fellow traditional teams. The Cartridge Eagles of Tunisia were unlucky to have been paired in the same group with Cameroon and Zambia and since only two teams could advance they had to go home. Like I did also predict in my previous article, the host country Angola which I described as 'an emerging soccer giant in the African continent,'ensured that the Eagles of Mali (one of the traditional teams) were sent home but not disgraced anyway.

The other teams that did not scale through the preliminary group stage were no push-over: they gave a good account of themselves. Finally the quarter-finalists have all emerged. The double defending champions Egypt were the only team that had 100% at the preliminary round having secured their maximum 9 points to top group C, qualifying alongside Nigeria who got 6 points. The host country Angola topped group A with 5 points having won a match and drawn the remaining two. Cote d'ivoire topped group B with 7 points, after winning a match, drawing one and had 3 points added to them because of the exit of Togo who were earlier ambushed by rebels in Cabinda. Ghana also qualified as runners-up garnering 6 points.

Cameroon started poorly in group D having lost their opening match against lowly rated Gabon but came back strong to win against Zambia and draw their last match against Tunisia. Group D was particularly interesting because three of the teams- Cameroon, Zambia and Gabon finished on 4 points each while Tunisia had 3 points to make it the most competitive.

Now that the big teams are advancing what do we expect this time? Remember that all the teams that would represent Africa at the 2010 world cup in South Africa except Tunisia are still around.

Is the champion going to come from among them or is it going to be host country, or the defending champions are going to make it a hat trick this time around? We should patiently wait till the 31st January, 2010 when the curtains of the competition would be drawn. Very soon football in Africa would grow to the point that one would not be able to predict with precision who would emerge as the champion in any competition because by then every team would have improve tremendously so that separating the minnows from the strong teams would be a Herculean task

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