Tough choice for African Footballer of the Year award
AFRICA will crown its best soccer player tomorrow but the electors have a tough choice in deciding between the three candidates for the 2017 African Footballer of the Year award.
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang of Borussia Dortmund and Gabon goes up against Liverpool’s Senegalese Sadio Mane and Egyptian Mohamed Salah with none of the final three candidates having a defining achievement over the last 12 months to set them apart.
The winner will be announced at the Confederation of African Football awards being hosted in Accra, Ghana.
Aubameyang, who was the African Footballer of the Year in 2015 and runner-up in the last poll to Riyad Mahrez, finished as top scorer in the Bundesliga last season, netting 31 goals, and continued his form in front of goal into the new campaign.
He also scored the winner in the German Cup final in May but that is hardly likely to resonate with the voters, who are the national team coaches and captains from each African country plus a selected panel of journalists.
Salah was named Arab Player of the Year for 2017 on Monday in a poll of about 100 sports journalists from several Arab countries.
At national team level, the 28-yearold Aubameyang made little impression at the African Nations Cup finals in his home country at the start of last year and then missed most of Gabon’s unsuccessful World Cup-qualifying campaign, citing transfer negotiations among the reasons for his absences.
Mane, 25, and Salah helped Senegal and Egypt qualify for the World Cup after lengthy absences and have emerged as leading players this season in the English Premier League.
Salah, 25, has the edge over his club mate since he was a major catalyst in Egypt reaching the Nations Cup final in Libreville in February and has scored regularly for Liverpool after his record transfer. — Reuters
BAFANA Bafana will effectively not get going until September this year when the qualifiers for the African Nations Cup finals resume.
The expansion of the size of the finals means qualification should be plain sailing.
The year 2018 does not promise to be too difficult for the national team and offers a chance to put aside the difficulties and personality clashes that bedevilled them in 2017.
South Africa‚ already with an away win in Nigeria under their belt‚ must finish in the top two of Group E to book a place in the 2019 finals to be held mid-year in either Cameroon or Morocco.
That is still some 18 months away‚ so there is plenty time to turn around the team after a horror 2017 in which they blew a strong World Cup qualification opportunity with a series of rubbish results.
Stuart Baxter’s first opportunity to get his players together will be in March during the next international window but just who South Africa are playing remains unclear since the