Hosts Ivory Coast target winning start as Cup of Nations kicks off
The first Africa Cup of Nations to be held in Ivory Coast in four decades gets underway on Saturday as the hosts, without their star forward Sebastien Haller, take on minnows Guinea-Bissau at the newly-built Ebimpe Olympic Stadium.
Ivory Coast have been African champions twice before, most recently in 2015 with a team captained by Yaya Toure, and are hoping to thrive under the pressure of playing at home. However, they can expect intense competition over the next four weeks with a strong field notably featuring 2022 World Cup semi-finalists Morocco, Mohamed Salah’s Egypt, and Sadio Mane’s Senegal, who are aiming to successfully defend the title they won in Cameroon two years ago.
“We feel the expectation every day but we just need to live with it,” Elephants coach Jean-Louis Gasset, the 70-year-old Frenchman, told reporters in the country’s economic capital Abidjan on Friday. “My job is to transform the pressure into something positive, to make sure that gives the players strength and confidence.”
Sitting alongside him, midfielder Franck Kessie, formerly of Barcelona, acknowledged: “We are all aware of what is expected of us.” This Ivory Coast team lacks a superstar like former hero Didier
Drogba and is without Borussia Dortmund striker Haller for at least the opening match as he continues to recover from an ankle injury.
A fit Haller—whose face appears regularly on billboards lining Abidjan’s traffic-choked streets— would be a certain starter for the Elephants against Guinea-Bissau, who have never won a game in three previous appearances at the AFCON.
The West African nation last hosted the AFCON in 1984, when just eight teams took part and Roger Milla’s Cameroon emerged victorious. This edition was initially supposed to take place last June and
July in order to avoid a clash with the middle of the season in Europe, where so many leading African players are based.
However, fears over staging it during the rainy season led to the tournament—which is the third edition to feature 24 teams—being pushed back to its more traditional January and February slot. The main focus for local organisers, and for the Confederation of African Football (CAF), is to make sure the competition unfolds without anything like the awful events that marred the last edition in Cameroon. —AFP