Roger Milla is 70 now and, if that makes those who remember the 1994 World Cup feel old, it also helps illustrate how long African football has seemed to have been waiting for another breakthrough World Cup. Since 1990 when, with Milla a mere 38, Cameroon beat Argentina and reached the quarter-finals, there has been the sense a team from the continent could go further, or several could emerge as challengers.
In 2022, when Vincent Aboubakar secured Cameroon’s second greatest win on the global stage by overcoming Brazil, albeit a second-string Selecao, it ended a wretched record for the Indomitable Lions: their nine previous World Cup games had produced eight defeats and a chaotic draw. They seemed to have regressed and, when no African side reached the last 16 in Russia, so did the continent as a whole. Cameroon’s class of 1990 remains arguably Africa’s finest and most famous World Cup team. Senegal, in 2002, and Ghana, in 2010, also got to the last eight; but for Luis Suarez’s impromptu display of goalkeeping, the Black Stars would have been semi-finalists.
