Africa producing World Cup-caliber players — but not teams
Shakira can belt out “This Time for Africa” all she wants — and doesn’t she do it enticingly well? — but the next time for Africa could be many, many years away.
It took the World Cup eight decades before it finally landed on African shores, and it might well be another three decades before it returns.
If South Africa 2010 has proved nothing else, it has showed that African teams still have a Kilimanjaro or two to climb before they arrive at the summit of world soccer.
Individually, the players are every bit as good as their European and South American counterparts. No one questions the skills of, say, Didier Drogba, Samuel Eto’o, Sulley Muntari or Steven Pienaar.
Collectively, though, they still trail, and the reasons why are many.
The combined record of the six African teams that took part in this World Cup was 4-11-5. Five of the six failed to make it out of the first round. Three — Algeria, Cameroon and Nigeria — failed to win a game. One, Algeria, failed to score a goal.
Only Ghana, which came within a missed penalty kick of reaching this week’s semifinals, showed the sort of potential that African teams have.
Had Asamoah Gyan’s kick in the last minute of extra time found the back of the net rather than Uruguay’s crossbar, this column would more likely have been about the surprising Black Stars than about Africa’s unrealized promise.
As Ghana’s Daily Graphic newspaper put it: “They have … sent out a strong signal to the rest of the world how ready Africa is to take on the game’s traditional powers.”
Well, yes and no.
Yes because the type of soccer that Ghana played was both physically powerful and exhilaratingly entertaining. A combination of speed and skill can be a winning mix — just look at Germany — and the Ghanaians used it to good effect in defeating Serbia and the U.S. and tying Australia and Uruguay.
Remember, also, that Ghana lost to Germany only by a 1-0 margin, and the Germans are being praised to the high heavens today.
The Ghanaians became only the third African team to reach the quarterfinals, after Cameroon in 1990 and Senegal in 2002, but that will be the only consolation they take home to Accra.
Marcel Desailly, born in Ghana but a World Cup winner with France when he captained Les Bleus in 1998, spoke about the continent’s place in the soccer world in a column in Cape Town’s Sunday Times.
“I must congratulate Ghana for showing that an African team can play well and with discipline,” Desailly wrote. “The tournament has shown, though, that the continent has a lot of work to do when it comes to getting the small details right. That said, as an African, I am encouraged by what I’ve seen.”
One obvious fault is that Africa is producing players but not coaches, or at least not giving them a chance. Whenever World Cup tournaments come around, home-grown coaches are abandoned in favor of foreign imports.
Of the six African teams that played in this World Cup, five had coaches from abroad, but it still did the teams no good. Only Ghana’s Serbian coach, Milovan Rejevac, was a good fit.
Otherwise, the shortcomings are not so much on the field for Africa as in the boardroom. Nigeria and its dysfunctional soccer federation is a prime example.
The government’s constant interference with the Super Eagles has time and again consigned Nigeria’s World Cup hopes to the dustbin, and the politicians, or at least one of them, did so again in 2010.
No sooner had Nigeria exited the tournament than the country’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, in an apparent fit of pique, declared that he was dissolving the Nigerian soccer federation and withdrawing the Super Eagles from international competition for two years.
The response from FIFA was swift. Unless Jonathan changes his stance and leaves the federation alone to manage its own affairs, world soccer’s governing body on Monday will suspend Nigeria indefinitely.
The impasse is typical of the way soccer is administered in too much of Africa. Still, the continent perseveres, just as Gyan has done since his costly missed penalty kick against Uruguay.
“It is part of football,” said Gyan’s Black Stars teammate, John Pantsil. “It is not a mistake; it is not a mistake at all. He kicked it from his heart. We all wanted to win the game but, yeah, we will pick it up from there.”
Africa, too, will pick it up from here. In four years, the World Cup will be played in Brazil, when only five African teams will represent the continent.
How well they do will tell whether the lessons of South Africa 2010 have been learned.
For the time being, though, it’s back to Shakira.
grahame.jones@latimes.com
