There is a daily ritual on Senegal’s beaches that begins just as the sun starts to set at about 5pm. Roughly divided by age, hundreds of young men play football until it gets dark or the tides of the Atlantic Ocean wash away their pitches and the discarded tyres being used as impromptu goalposts.
It only takes a few minutes of watching the dazzling array of skills on show to understand why Teranga Lions have won Africa’s Beach Soccer Cup of Nations on seven of the past nine occasions, although it needed another penalty shootout victory over Egypt to claim their fourth successive title in October.
