BEVERLY HILLS, January 17, (THEWILL) – After a thoroughly colorful opening ceremony in Cameroon’s Yaounde capital for the inauguration of the sixth edition of the TOTAL Africa Nations Championship (CHAN), the hostilities proper got underway with a pair of football matches scheduled for the first day.
It was an opening day for victories by slim margins and an accusation of voodoo-assisted triumph in the typical African sense. The two fixtures of the day ended 1-nil each and the dissatisfied coach of one of the losing sides was quick to blame his loss on the use of witchcraft by his opponent to make the first day of CHAN football an interesting one both on and off the pitch.
In contention on the opening day, Mali kicked off their CHAN campaign with a hard-fought 1-0 win over a tough Burkina Faso opposition. In the first all-West African clash of the competition, Les Aigles of Mali took all three points of the Group A match with an amazing 70th-minute header by enterprising left-back Siaka Bagayoko at the Ahmadou Ahidjo Stadium.
The 22-year-old, who plies his trade with local giants Djoliba after returning home from CS Sfaxien in Tunisia, was the deciding factor through his extraordinary long-range header which came from the failure of the Stallions of Burkina Faso to clear a corner from the danger area around their box.
Mali’s victory brought them level on three points with hosts CHAN host country Cameroon. The latter had, in the opening game of the competition earlier in the day, clashed against Zimbabwe and had beaten the southern African country by a similar margin.
It was a perfect start for the hosts as beating Zimbabwe allowed the mask-wearing, socially-distanced fans that the Confederation of African Football (CAF) permitted into the stadium to have something to cheer about and get excited for in the days to come in the competition.
The win came from a second-half goal by another defender Salomon Banga and it was all the Indomitable Lions needed to see off the stubborn southern Africans at the Ahmadou Ahidjo Stadium.
Were the Cameroonians not excessively profligate, they could have been more than one goal to the good. Yet, they were fortunate that the Cotonsport Garaou defender rose to the occasion to net an acrobatic kick on 72 minutes in the Group A match for their victory.
Another reason the game ended with just one goal was Zimbabwe’s goalkeeper Ariel Sibanda’s alertness and sharp reflexes. The goalie denied Jacques Zoua at the halfway stage of the first-half while Thierry Tchuente and Serge Andoulo also missed decent scoring opportunities to open the scoring further.
Cameroon’s triumph gave the home side the chance to settle well in the competition. In the games to come, they will get the opportunity to correct some of the errors in attack knowing that they could have won emphatically if they took the scoring chances they fluffed in the match.
The entertaining quality of the two low-scoring opening games of CHAN nonetheless, the first day was not entirely devoid of drama. It came in the reaction of the Zimbabwean coach Zdravko Logarusic to the sighting of a dead bat on the pitch of the Yaounde stadium used for his team’s tie against the hosts.
The 55-year-of Croatian accused Cameroon of ‘witchcraft’ ahead of tie. In a picture of him kneeing on the grass in front of the bat carcass, there was a sign on which was written “witchcraft in Cameroon”. This was shared to the Goal website before the match kicked off.
Although no one has directly linked Cameroon’s victory to the efficacy of the voodoo bat carcass and there has not been an official rebuttal from the authorities in Cameroon, the game can do without such recourse to the dramatic and without these side distractions that in no way add to the quality and development of football across the continent.
The results, though short on goals, have given a sense of what is to come and, while Group A leaders will fancy their chances of going far in the competition beyond the group stages, it remains too early to know how things will pan out. But, it makes for an interesting set of games to come.
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