The wait goes on
African World Cup 2022 qualifiers delayed
It is an old cliché that six months in sport can prove an eternity. In African football it can be even longer.
That holds particularly true for the World Cup qualifying process, which was set to resume in November with the start of the group phase, but which has since been postponed to next June.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been harshly felt across Africa, with borders firmly closed from the lockdown in March right through towards the end of the year, with none of the easing of travel restrictions that was seen across the European summer and allowed European football to return to action over a brief hiatus.
What it means for Africa, is that there will likely be much change by the time the 40 countries, who are still in contention for the five African places at the 2022 World Cup finals, return to the race to Qatar.
They have been divided into ten groups of four, with the ten winners advancing to two-legged play-offs to decide who qualifies. It is a return to the qualifying procedure used for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil with the final play-off round providing a dramatic finale.
The delay until mid-2021 comes after the Confederation of African Football decided it wanted to complete the qualifiers for the next Africa Cup of Nations finals first. They would have been done by now with the finals set for January, but the coronavirus has moved that all back 12 months.
There are still four rounds of Nations Cup qualifiers to be completed and they have now been scheduled for November and March – two matches each per window.
The World Cup preliminaries can then only resume in the next international window in June and are extended now through to March 2022.
Africa kicked off the race for places in Qatar in September 2019, with the
bottom 28 countries on the FIFA rankings playing off over two legs to produce 14 winners to go into the group phase where they have been joined by the top 26 ranked national teams.
Somalia were minutes away from a shock win over Zimbabwe who scrambled in two late goals to rescue themselves, but for the rest there were no upsets. 2006 World Cup qualifiers Angola and Togo both slipped significantly down the rankings that they had to go through the ignominy of competing in the preliminary round last year, but both progressed with an element of comfort.
It meant all 13 African countries who have previously been to a World Cup are involved in the group phase of the 2022 qualifiers, although after difficult draws for both of them, neither Angola nor Togo look in any way capable of recreating their giant-killing acts of the 2006 qualifiers.
The last World Cup in Russia proved a disaster for the image of the African game, with no teams advancing past the first stage in the worst return for Africa since the 1982 finals in Spain.
Just how the continent’s representatives will fare in 2022 is anyone’s guess at this stage, but it is the same contenders who look well set for places in Qatar.
Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia have all been handed draws they were well pleased with and can be expected to advance to the play-off round.
Algeria, who reached the second round in Brazil but did not qualify for Russia, have since won the Nations Cup and have been tasked with what seems a routine assignment in Group A, which includes tiny Djibouti, playing at a level they have no prior experience of.
But Cameroon and the Ivory Coast have been drawn together in Group D in a combustible mix, while Ghana and South Africa will go straight from competing against each other in the same Nations Cup qualifying group to battling again to determine who emerges top of Group G.
In Group J, the Democratic Republic of Congo (who were then Zaire when they competed at the 1974 finals in the then West Germany) are the only past finalists in a group where their three challengers – Benin, Madagascar and Tanzania – all have every right to believe they could advance to the last round of qualifiers.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been harshly felt across Africa, with borders firmly closed from the lockdown in March right through towards the end of the year
Group E, with Kenya, Mali, Rwanda and Uganda, is the only one of the ten groups without a past World Cup finalist, offering its winner a chance to move close to reaching the previously unattainable. Mali will be fancied over their east African rivals even if the country is wracked by political and security instability.