WORLD CUP 2006
Ivory Coast
Introduction
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Ivory Coast may be World Cup debutants but their achievement in seeing off the challenge of Cameroon and Egypt in the qualifiers, their runners-up finish at the African Nations Cup earlier this year, and the strong individual performances of key players at club level this season make them the continent’s biggest hope at this summer’s finals.
Henri Michel’s side have enough quality to suggest that they could actually emulate Cameroon in 1990 and Senegal in 2002 in reaching the quarter-finals.
That is a tough challenge, and the hardest part would be getting out of a group that also contains Argentina, Holland and Serbia & Montenegro.
The Ivorians certainly upset the formbook in the qualifiers, when Cameroon were the favourites, and in fact the west Africans only made it to the finals because Pierre Wome missed a penalty for Cameroon in the last minute of their final group match against Egypt.
But Ivory Coast showed their World Cup qualification was no fluke when reaching the Nations Cup Final and taking Egypt, the hosts, all the way to penalties.
It was a good team effort from a side whose collective quality is a lot stronger than any of the other four African World Cup finalists.
Up front, the Elephants have the goalscoring acumen of Chelsea’s Didier Drogba, but there are plenty of other quality players, including Arsenal defensive duo Kolo Toure and Emmanuel Eboue, highly-rated Saint-Etienne defensive midfielder Didier Zokora, PSG forward Bonaventure Kalou and young PSV striker Arouna Kone, who has the potential to be one of the finds of the finals.
Ivorian football has consistently produced stars over the decades, but collectively the national team have rarely fulfilled their potential. Ivory Coast have won the Nations Cup just once, in 1992, and although they have come close to World Cup qualification in the past, the feeling is they should have reached the finals sooner given the country’s relative economic prosperity and political stability over the years.
The irony is that now the country is racked by civil conflict, essentially borne out of the animosity between the southerners, mainly indigenous Christians, and a large Muslim population in the north, many of whom are immigrants originally encouraged to come to
the country to work in agriculture.
The team includes players from both sides of the divide, but Drogba surprised many at the Nations Cup by refusing to talk of the team as an instrument for peace and change. Instead, he said their priority was to win football matches, and that if peace was a by-product then that was a positive.
And while the Ivorians’ success has not unified the country, it is helping to defuse tension and is a welcome distraction from the drudgery of life.
Drogba has become an icon for the country, and much will depend on his accuracy. Zokora should gain many admirers, and Toure is maturing fast into a world-class defender.
But the Ivorians carry a heavy burden as an attentive Africa waits and hopes.
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