Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaultboy
Qualifying in Africa is tough and unpredictable. 52 unions with only 5 berths available. You are up against not only the quality of the opposing team, but also all sorts of off-field obstacles and tactics, including geography: no other federation has such a wide variety of climatic conditions, with as much travel involved. You can literally draw Ghana, Ethiopia, Egypt and South Africa, which makes for arduous travelling.
Cameroon and Nigeria, in the past built their qualification on winning at home and mitigating damage away. When you're in a tough group though, it makes for a risky tactic. Nigeria's best team was in 2002, and even then they went out in the first round, and also didn't qualify for the 2006 world cup. So your suprise at them doing poorly is based on reputation more than results, i wager.
In any case, I've rated Ivory Coast and Ghana as the most consistent African teams for the last couple of years. They play well anywhere on the continent.
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Not just reputation, but individual talent and actual opponents.
Nigeria has a team filled with players playing for the top leagues in the world. Unlike Tunisia, its direct opponent, who, despite playing in 2006, still has the majority of players based at home. Looking at individual talent, Nigeria is clearly superior on paper.
Cameroon has since taken the lead in their group, but they are still hanging by a thread and I don't think anyone really foresaw that. We are talking about the runners up in the African nations cup potentially losing a spot to a Gabon team that has never qualified for a world cup and hasnt even qualified for an African Nations cup in almost 10 years.
By the way, I don't know how you can say that no other federation has that variability in climatic conditions. Asia and South America have just as wide a variation, with a greater variation in altitude as well.