Predicting the winner of 2023 AFCON: As ‘awa lo kan’ trumps ’emi lo kan‘
By Tiko Okoye
Let the title of the major men’s football competition holding in 2024 not fluster you. It has little or nothing to do with the highly vexatious and notorious notion of “African time.” The highly prestigious biennial continental showpiece (“Africa’s World Cup”), often referred to as the TotalEnergies Africa Cup of Nations after the sponsors, was actually scheduled to hold last year but had to be shifted to January/February this year after suffering several setbacks. As things now stand, the next edition would hold next year, 2025, instead of 2026 that the two-year spacing would’ve warranted.
At the onset, there were 24 teams split into six groups (A – F) of four teams each. The teams in each group play a single round robin at the end of which the number of teams left standing will be pared down to 16, with the two top teams and the four best third-placed teams advancing.
And then they will be down to eight, the quarter-finals (winners of the round of 16), four, the semi-finals (winners of the quarter-finals) and two, finals (winners of both semi-finals), with the emergence of the ultimate champions. The tournament has so far lived up to its billing – if not more. There has been a surfeit of exhibition of sublime skills, enthralling and entertaining displays as well frustrating, eye-popping and disappointing results.
But all this hasn’t precluded several clerics from making a name for themselves, especially one Jedidia Henry Kore, who not only correctly predicted that Ghana will return empty-handed from the group stage, but also correctly predicted – after claiming to have “twice watched the match in the spirit realm” – that his country will play a 2-2 draw in the game with Mozambique, with an injury time equaliser coming from the latter.
While the clergyman’s fellow countrymen might be despondent, it doesn’t leave much to the imagination how the pinpoint accuracy of his prophecies would cause attendance at his church events to suddenly experience a quantum leap.
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This is one AFCON tournament that’s making bookmakers blush with embarrassment as teams they touted as minions and “weakest in their groups” eventually turned out heading their respective groups – a case in point being Equatorial Guinea topping a group comprising Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Guinea-Bissau!
How else too can one contextualise the likely exit – again – of one of Africa’s football powerhouse – Ghana – with its galaxy of foreign-based stars at the group stage? Okay, the Black Stars still have a hanging-by-the-thread chance to advance, if the following poignant words of French writer and moralist Jean de la Bruyere are anything to go by: “There are two ways of rising in (any human endeavour), either by your own industry or by the folly of others.”
Quite obviously, since Ghanaian players haven’t been able to rise on their own industry, they will be fervently praying to reap the fruits of any folly committed by the other teams in the group, such as Zambia losing to Morocco and Cameroon failing to beat the Gambia. But why should an African football powerhouse such as Ghana have to toe such a nerve-wracking labyrinthine route paved with specific outcomes beyond their control?
There was no crystal-ball that foresaw the total humiliation the host country and another African football powerhouse, Ivory Coast, suffered in a 4-0 pummelling by a supposed minion, Equatorial Guinea, the very same tiny island, formerly called Fernando Po, just a stone’s throw from Calabar and Oron! How are the mighty fallen!
For now, the Elephants, reeling from the shock and trauma attendant with a likely early exit, would be fervently praying that the three points they garnered from their opening-day defeat of Guinea-Bissau would be sufficient to see them scrape through as one of the third-place ‘best losing’ four teams, if Cameroon fails to beat Gambia.
Let me unequivocally declare that as a patriotic Nigerian, I’d be rooting for the Super Eagles to be ultimately crowned the champions of Africa in the ongoing AFCON tournament, no matter what. My confidence is buoyed by the sheer superiority in the number of our prized football assets and the combined market value of the team. The Nigerian men’s team, with an estimated market value exceeding £300 million, clearly stands out like a colossus! The Ghanaian team comes a very distant second with just below £150 million.
So, whether you look at it from the patriotic perspective or that of the combined market value or both, the Super Eagles were – and still are – marked up as the clear favourites for the football diadem. But at the end of the day, it all still boils down to a battle of wits involving 11 men versus 11 men, and victory will hopefully go to the more efficient team.
The use of the word “efficient” is very deliberate because at the end of the day “winning is not the only thing but everything,” as the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers American Football Club, Vince Lombardi, was wont to say. A club can have more than 70% monopoly of ball possession, with 10 or more shots at goal, while the team with 30% ball possession and only one shot goal makes it count by winning the game by 1-0! This is what’s called ‘efficiency.’
I’ve practically been on pins and needles since the first match involving Nigeria in Group A commenced. The attackers have been very wasteful in the final third of the field of play. In the past, Nigerians were very bothered by the lack of sure-footedness on the part of the defenders and the goalkeeper. But just as the performances of the new man between the posts – Stanley Bobo Nwabali who plays in the same position for South Africa’s Premier Soccer League club Chippa United – and a rejuvenated defence seemed to be calming down the nerves of anxious Nigerians, the attackers appear to have gone rogue!
But truth be told, I’m not overly bothered by the way the Super Eagles have scraped through their group games. In the preceding tournament in Cameroon, we won all our three group games only to be knocked out by Tunisia in the round of 16, just as we were beginning to count the chicks before they hatched. Nigerian male and female football teams – at all age levels – have this very funny habit of doing excellently well when not given any chances and doing very poorly when so much hype is built around them.
True to type, I’m counting on these players to continue scraping through to the finals just as their Stephen Keshi-coached colleagues did in South Africa in 2013 – a ‘despised’ team that similarly clambered up from scratch to the finals – and won! Despite winning with the barest number of goals scored and tiniest of margins, I expect this team to keep improving as the tournament progresses.
But that’s not to say that I haven’t been surprised by, and impressed with, the scintillating performances of dark horses like Equatorial Guinea and Cape Verde. Aside Nigeria, I’ll pick one of both countries to emerge champions of the 2023 AFCON. And I’m certainly not making this prediction because the Ghanaian cleric I earlier mentioned – remember Prophet Kore? – is tipping an underdog to emerge as winner of the 2023 AFCON competition, meaning bye-bye Senegal, Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, Cameroon, South Africa, Mali, Ivory Coast and Ghana; and welcome Equatorial Guinea and Cape Verde!
A few last words. The efficiency concept implies that the team that would emerge as champions would play smart football. The defence would be tight and well-marshalled while the midfielders creatively find ways to constantly motivate a properly-focused forward line to maximize every goal-scoring opportunity that comes their way. Teams that brim with stars who can be counted on to completely confound and mesmerise opponents with individual displays would give way to teams with not-too-good players who nonetheless exhibit superlative teamwork.
The buzz around Equatorial Guinea and Cape Verde and the calamitous falls suffered by Ghana and Ivory Coast underscores the veracity of famous American writer and humorist Mark Twain’s adage that “What counts is not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog!”
During the run-up to the presidential primary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the widely touted frontrunner, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who the party national leadership was doing its uttermost to push under a bus, emotively cried out at a delegates’ town hall meeting in a state where even the governor was supporting his opponent: Emi lo kan, meaning “It is my turn (so there can be no stopping me!).”
Players of whichever team that emerges as 2023 AFCON Champions must not have their stomachs burning from the fire of an unquenchable hunger for victory like the Emi lo kan exponent, but must also be ready to up their game and synchronously perform like persons possessed by the motivational hormones spun by the magic of Awa lo kan! (meaning “It is our turn and there can be no stopping our well-oiled team!”). And President Tinubu would’ve succeeded – even if unintentionally – to add another phraseology to the African lexicography!
