A week ago, Ivory Coast were on the end of a 4-0 battering from Equatorial Guinea. Now they are in the last eight of the Africa Cup of Nations having eliminated the champions. They are a team that has repeatedly seemed dead and buried since the tournament began – never more so than when a goal behind with four minutes remaining on Monday – and yet somehow Sébastien Haller’s zombie army marches on to a quarter-final against Mali or Burkina Faso.
Senegal, having been the best side in the group stage, had seemed in control until the introduction of Haller. This had seemed like a classic case of scoring an early goal and then seeing the game out. It was not, and so the curse goes on: no defending champion has made it to the quarter-finals since Egypt in 2010. “We deserved to go to the quarter-final,” said the Senegal coach, Aliou Cissé, who professed himself disappointed yet proud – “but this is the game of football so we can’t complain”.
