Mohamed Salah against Sadio Mané, two great Liverpool forwards going head-to-head in Sunday’s Africa Cup of Nations final. It’s the headline clash of Egypt against Senegal, the meeting of the most successful side in African history and a team that has never lifted the trophy. But to focus on them would be misleading: although both have had an influence late in games, neither Senegal nor Egypt could be said to be teams based around their attacking talent.
There is an unavoidable sense that even to focus on the football is itself uncomfortable, given the tragic events of a fortnight ago when eight fans were trampled to death outside Stade Olembé, where the final will be staged. The quarter-final at the venue was moved, but after a review it was decided Thursday’s semi-final should be played there.
Emotionally that may have felt strange, walking across the road and through the gate where the tragedy occurred, but logistically it was almost certainly the right choice given the absence of viable alternatives for a major game featuring the hosts. Olembé is a magnificent stadium set in a vast amount of space; to create the conditions in which a crush could occur took spectacular incompetence. The extent to which lessons had been learned was difficult to tell on Thursday given only 24,000 turned up, seemingly put off by safety concerns.
The disaster rightly dominates any consideration of the tournament, but what happened a week gone Monday was just part of much wider chaos. The Cup of Nations is a competition that feels as though it always has to justify its existence; these last few weeks have not made much of a case either on or off the pitch. The organisation has been generally dismal while, not helped by some poor playing surfaces, much of the football has been grim, with an average of just 1.88 goals per game.
Senegal’s method is to stifle the opposition, take control of midfield and strike late on, something in which they have been aided in the last two games by the returning fitness of Ismaïla Sarr, who has been able to come off the bench and add to their attacking threat. Eight of the nine goals Senegal have scored in the tournament so far have come after the hour. Defensively they have been all but impeccable, letting in only one goal – Jannick Buyla’s kneed volley late in the quarter-final – and conceding nine shots on target in the whole tournament.
Egypt’s method is simply to stifle, the natural caution of Carlos Queiroz combining with their traditional aptitude for timewasting to produce a style that has yielded just four goals in 630 minutes of football. They have let in only two, although they have been offering up 12.33 shots per game, most of which have been from range.
The sense is that their greatest strength is their mental robustness and the way they get in the heads of their opponents – that, and penalties; Egypt have won their last six shootouts, including two here. Although they have beaten only Guinea-Bissau and Sudan in normal time so far in the tournament, they have had a far harder route to the final than Senegal, seeing off Ivory Coast, Morocco and the hosts Cameroon. And it should never be forgotten how difficult north African sides have always found tournaments in sub-Saharan Africa; Egypt themselves, in 2008 and 2010, are the only north African side ever to have won the Cup of Nations outside north Africa.
But for all that, the lasting impression is of their gamesmanship. The legacy of their veteran goalkeeper Essam El-Hadary, who had the lowest pain threshold of any man ever to play international football, is secure in the hands of both Mohamed El Shenawy and, after he really did get injured in a confusing boy‑who‑cried‑wolf irony, Mohamed Abou Gabal. Egyptian goalkeeping is a long‑running medical soap opera to rank alongside Casualty or Emergency Ward 10, with Abou Gabal spending much of the semi-final writhing in hopeless agony.
Queiroz himself has been in a bafflingly fretful mood all tournament, seething as he stalks his technical area, apparently convinced everything is rigged against him. The general behaviour of the Egypt bench in the quarter‑final was a disgrace, as they contested decision after decision, berating the fourth official and antagonising Morocco’s coaching staff, earning the assistant coach Roger De Sa a four-game ban.
The Egyptian FA then protested against the appointment of the experienced referee Bakary Gassama for the semi-final, for no better reason it seemed than that he had taken charge of their group-stage defeat to Nigeria. Gassama, with his bald head and staring eyes very much the Gambian Collina, likes to impose himself and, having warned Queiroz when he went down on his knees, giving it the full Platoon as a free-kick near the halfway line went against his side early on, showed him two yellow cards for dissent in three second-half minutes.
As a result, Queiroz will not be on the bench for the final. Queiroz continued his assault on Gassama after the game and then, laughably, another coach, Diaa El-Sayed, asked for the final to be delayed 24 hours because Egypt would have had a day’s less rest than their opponents.
Senegal will have their own memories of how referees can be influenced by Egyptian pressure: the last time the sides met in the final stages, in the semi-final in Cairo in 2006, they were denied a blatant last-minute penalty when Diomansy Kamara was chopped down by Ibrahim Said with Egypt leading 2-1.
That is just one of the historical disappointments Senegal are trying to overcome. Their coach, Aliou Cissé, missed the decisive penalty in the shootout in the final in 2002, and there is the fresher memory of defeat in the final to Algeria in 2019. For Senegal, winning the Cup of Nations has become a quest, their own doubts almost as much of a barrier as their opponents. In that context Egypt, ruthless serial winners, may be the worst side for them to be facing.
