Senegal celebrated their first Cup of Nations win, but this was a grim event stained by tragedy

This piece was written by Jonathan Wilson for Issue 44

We were in Bafoussam when the disaster happened. We’d covered Gambia’s win over Guinea, then went back into town and watched Cameroon’s win over Comoros over dinner in a hotel. That seemed, at the time, good knockabout fun, albeit tainted by some absurd decision- making by Caf.

Comoros had named only three goalkeepers in their 28-man squad so, with one injured and two others testing positive for Covid, it became apparent the day before the game that they would have to field an outfielder in goal. But then on the morning of the match, Ali Ahamada returned a negative Covid test. In a similar situation the day before, five Tunisians had been cleared at the last minute to play in their last-16 match against Nigeria, but it turned out Caf had changed the regulations overnight and required players to self-isolate for five days even after a negative test. Ahamada was out, and so Chaker Alhadur, a 5’7” left-back, had to play in goal.

When the Comoros captain Nadjim Abdou was sent off after seven minutes, an extremely difficult task seemed to have become impossible. But Comoros played well, and it wasn’t until the Youssouf M’Changama scored with a brilliant long-ranger to keep Comoros in it. At that stage it seemed the story that night was of a plucky underdog battling gamely against the odds, and yet further heartless and bewildering mismanagement from Caf, something they compounded by fining Comoros US$5000 for “failure to respect the jersey numbers already registered on the CMS system by the player” – which is to say, Alhadur wore one of the other goalkeeper’s shirts but with his number three fashioned out of tape on the back.

It quickly became apparent, though, that something far more serious had happened.

By the following morning it had been confirmed that at least eight people had died in a crush outside the ground, with dozens more injured. It was clear we would have to travel back to Yaoundé, rather than staying in Bafoussam to cover Senegal’s last-16 tie against Cape Verde. So we messaged Sylvester, our driver.

Unfortunately, we’d asked him to pick us up at 2pm and so it took him a little while to respond – understandably: why wouldn’t he have gone out to celebrate Cameroon’s win? When he did, he said he needed to get the car cleaned and would pick us up afterwards, at about 10.15. We stressed the urgency of getting back to Yaoundé but he was adamant. Only much later, when we got back in the car after stopping by the roadside to buy some pineapples, did we catch the faint whiff of vomit. It hadn’t occurred to use that he was cleaning the inside of the car. But Sylvester got us back to Yaoundé at about 3pm and also called a few of his friends who had been at the game. One, Francis, a salesman for a print company, had seen nothing outside the ground but had witnessed a fan collapse in the celebrations after the second goal. “I thought he was dead,” he said. The south section of the ground – that is, the end behind the goal Cameroon had attacked in the first half – it seemed, had been seriously overcrowded.

Romaric, an emergency doctor, had been there as a fan with his fiancée. It had been about 7.50pm when he had approached the south end of the ground.

“There were only 10 or 20 police officers for about 1,000 people, it was not enough,” he said. “I clearly heard one of them say that the stand was full, that they should start locking the gates. Policemen were telling everyone that other gates were open but many wanted to take the shortest route rather than go round,” Romaric said. “We kept moving and walked to the entrance that was the most free.”

Romaric left the stadium after the second goal, looking to beat the traffic. “We went out and realised there were a lot of people covered in dust, as if they’d been in an accident,” he said. “I asked one women who had dirt all over her body, ‘What happened? Why did people have to die?’

“She told me, ‘People were pushing each other, pushing everywhere trying to enter.’ Some fell and were trampled on; that’s how some of them died on the spot and others were injured.”

The Stade Paul Biya is in the suburb of Olembe in the far north of Yaoundé; the vast majority of people approach it from the south. There are some reports that in the group stage the east and north gates were never opened, although those have proved impossible to verify. Spectators approach the stadium up a wide avenue where they undergo their Covid tests, then pass through security. There is then a road going across the avenue before a solid white-painted metal fence.

In that fence are three gates. When we got there only the left-hand one was open, and it seems that was how it had been the previous night. The area had been swept. But on the ground there were shards of plastic vuvuzelas in Cameroonian green, yellow and red, a discarded sandal, a solitary shoe and two pairs of broken sunglasses. Journalists who investigated during the second half, after news of a disaster had first started to emerge, reported seeing dozens of shoes and broken vuvuzelas inside the gate.

It was there, on the unremarkable dusty concrete, that the tragedy had occurred. Outside, a temporary metal barrier still lay flat, buckled over the kerb, where it had been knocked down and trodden on by fans trying to get from the central gate to the open one to the left. There is still some confusion as to exactly what happened. At a press conference that day, the president of Caf, Patrice Motsepe, acknowledged that a gate “was closed for inexplicable reasons. If that gate was open as it was supposed to, we wouldn’t have had this problem we have now, this loss of life.”

But the following Friday, Cameroon’s sports minister Narcisse Mouelle Kombi said that the issue had been caused by a rush of fans desperate to get in after they heard the national anthems. “That entry gate was momentarily closed by security forces in the face of a surge of spectators despite other entry gates being in operation,” he said. “Overwhelmed by this surge of people, the security forces took the reckless decision to open the south gate, leading to a crush.” From that, and the subsequent report, it seems all three gates were closed to try to stop fans pushing forwards and, when that only worsened the crush, the left-hand gate was opened, leading to the fatal surge.

A triage centre was set up at the stadium and casualties taken to the nearby Messassi Hospital. A security guard there, Ay, who had been on the night shift, told us that everybody who needed further treatment had been sent to specialist units around the city by 4am. Eight went to the Centre des Urgences de Yaoundé (Cury), although two were discharged immediately. By the time we got there, three more had been released and another was just being taken out in a wheelchair having suffered temporary paralysis after being trampled on.

Dr Diana Bikele explained in great detail what she had seen. Everybody she had treated had been trampled. In photographs we later saw of seven of the eight bodies, footprints were clearly visible on the white vest of the one of the men. A 20-year-old male lay in one bed. He said he had felt “a pressure on my chest” after Aboubakar’s goal and had then lost consciousness. It’s not clear whether that had anything to do with the crowded conditions, but what is known is that he was then trampled upon. It’s possible that he was the casualty seen by Francis.

The other man, Salomon, was caught in the crush outside the ground. “I went to support my team,” he said. “The game had started. There were many fans at the gate and they surged. I fell down, just like that, and people trampled over me.”

It was rapidly decided that the quarter-final scheduled for Olembe, between Egypt and Morocco, would be shifted to the other stadium in Yaoundé, the Ahmadou Ahidjo, as would the Senegal v Equatorial Guinea game that was supposed to be staged in Douala. Officially it was moved because of the state of the pitch, but there was speculation that Douala was being cleared as a contingency in case Olembe was not passed to stage the semi-final and final.

That meant a double-header, which was as chaotic as could be expected. There were fistfights in the press box at full-time in the first game as Senegalese journalists tried to clear Moroccan journalists out of their seats. Media facilities were generally dreadful. In Limbé there were long lines of desks but no power. In Douala there were so few desks that print media had to sit in ordinary seats with their laptops on their knees and no power (in temperatures of 35 degrees with humidity at over 90%). At the Ahidjo, desk space was extremely limited and the water ran out at half-time in the first game. For the first time at a Cup of Nations a system had been set up for journalists to apply for individual games, but it collapsed in the knockout phase with confirmation/rejection emails for games being sent out during the games themselves. The result was the usual bunfight around some harassed media officer’s table – an unnecessary irritation at the best of times, but during the pandemic a clear health risk.

Nobody cares about journalist’s complaints and to an extent rightly so; but this is part of a wider culture of incompetence and negligence. In terms of facilities, nothing has improved in a decade. Caf, surely, wants its tournament promoted and publicised around the world. The local organisers certainly do. And yet there is not the slightest understanding of the elements that would make a journalist’s life easier. None of this is especially complicated: a designated desk, a power point, wifi – and water if taking bottles in is prohibited. For the media, the basic lack of thought doesn’t much matter: our lives are made slightly more complicated and uncomfortable for a few hours. But when a similar attitude is applied to fans, the consequences can be fatal.

The initial local organising committee (Cocan) report into the tragedy began by praising the Cameroonian government for “surmounting all the obstacles” to produce “magnificent results”, and went on to note “that since the launch of the CAN on January 09, 2022, no incident had been reported on all of the competition sites. The remarkable organisation of this tournament has also been praised by many knowledgeable observers around the world. Unfortunately… a fatal incident occurred on Monday 24 January 2022, near the Olembe stadium.” It was very much in the vein of the swimming-pool attendant on The Day Today listing all the years in which nobody died.

There was a weird reference to other stadium disasters unrelated to this one, as though that were an excuse – this can happen anywhere – rather than a catastrophic failure to learn the lessons of previous tragedies. The report went on, “this fatal incident was caused by a massive and late influx of spectators to the stadium. Indeed, even though the access gates were open from 3pm, several spectators went to the stadium around 6pm… [which] … caused congestion at this busy entrance, presumably because it leads to the main flight leading to the stadium. Several testimonies indicate that this entrance was temporarily closed by the law enforcement forces, in order to discipline the increasing number of spectators and jostling in front of the access gate. It should however be noted that other entrances reserved for the public were operational, in particular on the East and North sides of the stadium.”

But this really is preposterous. The evidence of previous Cups of Nations and the earlier games in this tournament is that there is always a rush at the last minute. Why would anybody go several hours early to sit in the baking heat in the stadium? Cameroon has more of a match-going culture than many African countries, but still it is extremely rare for crowds to top 20,000. If the authorities wanted people to go early, there would have needed to be a lengthy information campaign, plus proper facilities in the stadium.

The point, then, is not that there was a late rush at the gates, but that that rush was entirely predictable and crowd control measures put in place to head it off entirely inadequate. And, frankly, it doesn’t matter how tough a few young soldiers with AK47s look, there isn’t much they can do when a crowd starts to surge. And, having blamed the fans, the report then listed 27 measures for the security forces to take to try to prevent anything similar happening again – which rather suggested there had been organisational failure.

Whose responsibility, then, is that? The fans who turned up shortly before kick- off and found themselves in chaos? The officer who made the fateful decision about the gate? Or the broader culture that failed to recognise the potential dangers and put in place fairly basic measures to guard against them?

Motsepe was keen to stress that Caf has no “legal responsibility”, which may be true. But should Cocan take the blame? Only 25,000 turned out for Cameroon’s last World Cup qualifier for which fans were allowed; around half that for the one before that. Caf is the body that hosts major tournaments every two years. But then, this is not a Caf with experience. Last April, as part of Motsepe’s reforms after replacing Ahmad Ahmad as president, Caf’s Chief of Staff and Heads of IT, Legal Affairs and Compliance, Finance, and Human Resources, along with other senior officials were all sacked, it seemed to facilitate Fifa’s annexing of the confederation. Nobody can doubt that Motsepe, a mining billionaire who owns Mamelodi Sundowns, is Gianni Infantino’s man.

But purges create vacuums of knowledge, and that can be very dangerous. The orchestrator of the Night of the Long Knives was Véron Mosengo-Omba, an Infantino ally who is Caf’s new secretary general. He sent a letter to Cocan on 17 November 2021 highlighting three key points that needed to be put right before Olembe would be ratified as a venue. The second of those is the construction of the “exterior perimeter fencing” – that is, the fence at which the tragedy occurred. Now that is not to say the fence caused the tragedy; if it hadn’t been there, given the avenue narrows, there may just have been a bottleneck nearer the stadium. But the point is that Caf knew there was a problem; it recognised the danger of a mass of people surging down that avenue, and still eight people died there.

But the tournament went on, as football tends to. Everybody – fans, players, officials – seemed keen to brush the deaths aside, although a minute’s silence was held at every game thereafter. As a tournament, it had begun slowly, before gradually improving, almost round by round. And as this is a tournament that seems locked constantly in an existential battle to prove its worth, those early games were damaging. The first round of games, eight matches, produced dull and dismal football and yielded just nine goals.

How, though, really, could it have been otherwise? Football, increasingly, is about pattern in the attacking phase, about players knowing where their teammates will be almost before they get there. How can that level of cohesion, developed over weeks of training at club level, ever be instilled when players were joining up with their national teams just a week before the tournament began? Covid caused further complications.

Defence is easier, and changes far less from team to team; it’s little wonder if national coaches with limited time prioritise getting the back four right and only then look to build on that – a trait amplified by the format of the tournament: four third-place teams going through encourages sides to look to get a point on the board in their opening game.

But gradually, as the groups went on and players settled, the football improved. And what became apparent is that the trend of recent Cups of Nations is continuing. The big teams may have plateaued, may even be getting worse – there is certainly no sense that we are any closer to an African World Cup winner now than we were a decade ago – but the middle ranks are improving, and rapidly. The Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, Malawi, Cape Verde, Sierra Leone and Comoros all impressed, the first four making it through to the last 16, while giants such as Ghana and Algeria crashed out. Given how unwieldy the 24-team format is, there is an argument for expanding the tournament to 32 teams: with DR Congo, Congo, Zambia and South Africa all failing qualify, it would be hard to argue that adding eight more teams would dilute the quality. The issue is a logistical one: putting on a 24-team tournament is a stretch for most nations; 32 may be out of the reach of all but a tiny handful and would probably require more co-hosting. In itself that is no bad thing, but Caf is not necessarily a body you would trust to rise to organisational challenges.

Yet there had, despite it all, been drama in the first phase. Ghana, almost inconceivably, went out in the group stage. There was no disgrace for them in losing to a very good Morocco, but they then conceded late on to draw against a Covid-ravaged Gabon. Still, nobody really expected them to fail to beat Comoros, who had lost their first two games. Ghana, though, went behind in the fourth minute and soon had their captain, André Ayew, sent off. Perhaps he was a little unfortunate, penalised for stretching to reach a cross and catching the Comoros keeper Boina Ben, but there had been a ratty, ill-disciplined air about Ghana throughout, and they had had Benjamin Tetteh sent off amid a brawl at the end of the game against Gabon (a mood that carried on when Thomas Partey was sent off in his first game back in England, for Arsenal in their League Cup semi-final second leg against Liverpool). Although, belatedly, Ghana showed spirit to battle on with 10 men, they lost 3-2, twice caught on the break in the second half.

The president of the Ghana Football Association, Kurt Okraku, pointed out that the coach, Milovan Rajevac, had had little time to work with the squad since replacing Charles Akonnor in November, but that only raises the question of why the decision to change coach was taken then. Rajevac, who had led Ghana to the final in 2010 in his first sell in charge, was then himself sacked, at a reported cost of £275,000, leaving Ghana in chaos heading into their World Cup qualifying play-off against Nigeria in March. The appointment of Chris Hughton as technical director with Otto Addo as coach was at least an unexpected response.

But Ghana’s failure was, at least to an extent, predictable. Compare this squad to the one Rajevac led to the final in 2010 and it is obviously of far lesser quality. Gideon Mensah of Bordeaux was the only player in the squad under the age of 25 at a top-flight club in one of Europe’s big five leagues. That they came through a tricky World Cup group with relative comfort probably should have been a reason to keep Akonnor on.

The elimination of Algeria, though, came as a major surprise. Unbeaten in 35 games, the defending champions suffered a complete breakdown in midfield against Equatorial Guinea. Having gone behind, they ended up with four players effectively hanging around on halfway, waiting for service, while their opponents happily ran the clock down in the Algeria half. That left them having to beat Côte d’Ivoire to progress but, having twice conceded against the run of play in the first half, that never seemed realistic and they lost 3-1, a reminder that even very good teams can be undone by tournament football, even a tournament with as forgiving a format as this one.

Mali’s opening group game against Tunisia had been progressing calmly enough when, with Mali leading 1-0, the Zambian referee Janny Sikazwe abruptly gave three sharp blasts of his whistle and pointed to the dressing rooms. Players reacted with bewilderment: only 85 minutes had been played. Sikazwe was persuaded to restart the game. He then sent off Mali’s El Bilal Touré for a largely innocuous foul, sticking with his original decision even after VAR asked him to review it, before blowing for full-time again after 89 minutes and 47 seconds. Tunisia’s coaching staff were understandably furious, but the players left the pitch and so, eventually, did Sikazwe, although only with a security detail to protect him from the Tunisians.

But 20 minutes later, as the Mali manager Mohamed Magassouba was giving his post-match press-conference, Caf officials interrupted him to say that a further three minutes needed to be played (this still seemed on the short side). Magassouba, understandably, looked appalled, but complied. “I told the players that we can only control what is on the pitch,” he said. “Off the pitch, that’s up to the administrators. When we were told to go back out and play the players were more than willing. Unfortunately, our opponents didn’t want to come out.”

Sikazwe was not there, replaced by his fourth official. And neither were Tunisia. “The players were taking ice baths for 35 minutes before they were called back out again,” said the Tunisia coach Mondher Kebaier. “I’ve been coaching for a long time but never seen anything like it.”

At first it seemed that Sikazwe had simply forgotten to stop his watch for the second-half water-break, before rather brusquely refusing to accept he may have made mistakes. But it soon turned out he had been suffering severe heatstroke. “The doctors told me my body was not cooling down,” he said. “In a normal scenario, it is allowed to tell the fourth official to continue a match in case you are unable to continue, but I could not do it because there was a stage where I could not hear anyone and even the communication device became too hot and I even wanted to throw it away. It would have been just a little time before [I would have gone] into a coma and that would have been the end. I think God told me to end the match. He saved me.”

What followed was the familiar discourse about the discourse. In Europe and the US a lot of the coverage of the incident took a tone of ‘yet more chaos at the crazy tournament’, while much of the African coverage was defensive, pointing out that a game had been finished prematurely in Spain last year and that European referees had made major mistakes in big games. But the issue is one of context. Sikazwe was unfortunate. He is a good referee. He took charge of the 2017 Cup of Nations final and has officiated at two World Cups. There perhaps are questions to be asked about why matches are being played in heat and humidity that can put officials – and also, presumably players – at risk, but fundamentally this was something that could have happened to any referee. But the problem is it fits a pattern and so is placed in the narrative that the Cup of Nations is a uniquely chaotic event. And that, ultimately, comes back to Caf and the fact that the Cup of Nations so often does exist in a fug of disorganisation.

Douala was the worst of the chaos. It is a busy, noisy, hectic city anyway, even by African standards. The 45,000-capacity stadium was perhaps a third full for Egypt against Côte d’Ivoire in the last 16. That may not sound like many, but by Cup of Nations standards for games not involving the hosts, that is a big crowd – particularly given the Covid restrictions and anxiety about the tragedy that had happened in Yaoundé two days earlier.

The Covid testing was largely a box- ticking exercise, the simulacrum of an exercise in healthcare, but then Covid isn’t taken particularly seriously in Cameroon. Malaria is the big fear, affecting around one in four people per year. A reported 7000 a year are killed in road traffic accidents – although the true figure is probably much higher. The vast majority of Covid fatalities are over the age of 60; in Cameroon life expectancy is 59.

Media facilities in Douala were appalling, the policing and stewarding absurdly officious. Tickets were misplaced because volunteers refused to believe some journalists might have been filed under their surnames rather than their forenames. In what was laughably termed the press box – some empty seats – three of us were threatened with expulsion for standing up even though we were the only three people there and there were still three hours till kick-off – a classic case of the familiar problem that rules, when followed, were imposed with no sense of why or when they might be useful.

Egypt played for penalties from the off, spoiled and moaned and wasted time, Côte d’Ivoire lost belief and ended up being beaten in a shoot-out, as Mohamed Abou Gabal, who had only come on in the 88th minute, saved Eric Bailly’s dinked penalty.

When we got into the car in Douala to drive back to Yaoundé the following morning, there was what appeared to be a white sailor’s hat, or at least a fancy- dress version of one, on the back seat.

“You’ve got a hat,” I said, thinking it might have been left over from a kid’s birthday party or something that Sylvester might have been to with his younger sister, who lives in Douala, the previous night.

“Oh, yes,” he said, taking it from me and laying it next to him. “I wear it sometimes for my driving.”

A little way out of town, we saw a group of orange-clad road-safety officials. Similar officials stopped us twice on the way to Douala and had found excuses to issue what we’ll call fines both times. But this time, as we approached, Sylvester put on his hat. The official blew his whistle, waved, and flagged us through. Sylvester took the hat off.

A few dozen miles later, the same thing again. In total, we passed through four checkpoints on the journey, and each time Big Syl’s Magic Hat got us through.

That evening, we had dinner with a contact who works for the UNHCR. We told the story of the magic hat.

“Ah yes,” he said, “Sylvester is famous for that.”

As it turned out that was the penultimate game in Douala. The last was the quarter-final, Cameroon’s first game since the tragedy. The policing and Covid-testing were noticeably stepped up, as though snipers on roof-tops and swabs up the nose were going to alleviate basic failures of crowd control.

The hosts were comfortable 2-0 winners over Gambia.

Burkina Faso then beat Tunisia 1-0. The goal was a controversial one, the ball seeming to bounce up and graze Dango Ouattara’s knuckles as he cut inside before finishing. Once that wouldn’t have been an issue as it clearly wasn’t deliberate, but this seemed a very obvious case of a goal being scored “immediately after the ball has touched their hand/ arm, even if accidental” – which is now an offence. Tunisia, it feels, have been on the wrong end of a karmic reset since a laughable penalty was awarded against them in the quarter-final in 2015, almost as though referees in general, sick of the gamesmanship for which they were once notorious, now routinely give controversial calls against them.

There had been a military coup in Burkina Faso six days before the game. Players had watched on television, and had spoken both of their unease and the sense that they had a greater responsibility to perform for their nation. A curfew imposed in Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso was spontaneously broken by celebrating fans and was lifted altogether for the semi-final.

In the first leg of the following day’s double-header in the Ahidjo, Morocco, who had probably been the best attacking side in the tournament to that point, took an early lead from a penalty but then allowed themselves to be drawn into Egypt’s anti-football. Mohamed Salah poked in the equaliser from a corner before making the burst down the right that led to Trézéguet’s extra-time winner. The overriding image of the game, though, was of their bench protesting en masse at every decision, behaviour that ultimately earned the assistant coach Roger De Sá a four- match touchline ban.

Senegal had been grimly functional in the group, drawing two games 0-0 and winning the other 1-0 with a debatable late penalty. They’d won their last-16 game 2-0, but only after Cape Verde had gone down to nine men – a game that once again exposed just how resistant football is to proper concussion protocols, with Sadio Mané playing on till he’d opened the scoring despite being floored for several minutes after a blow to the head. They finally conceded their first goal of the tournament as Jannick Buyla cancelled out Famara Diédhiou’s opener 12 minutes after the break, but the introduction of Ismaïla Sarr, who had missed the start of the tournament through injury, turned the game back in their favour. In the end they won comfortably enough, 3-1.

Burkina Faso were no match for Senegal in the semi-final, beaten 3-1 in a game that was again heavily influenced by the arrival of Sarr in the second half. They are a young side and there is no reason why they should not come again – although the post-tournament dismissal of their coach Kamou Malo was not a positive sign; he was impressive throughout and was clearsighted enough to drop his son after the opening defeat to Cameroon. A record of three semi-finals in nine years, anyway, represents a remarkable achievement given they had only ever previously reached that stage once, and that when they hosted the tournament in 1998.

The other semi-final, played at Olembe, felt like a repeat of Egypt’s last-16 tie, as Cameroon threatened to get in behind the full-backs early on before being slowly ground down by Egypt’s spoiling. This time, at least, there was a referee in Bakary Gassama who was prepared to try to combat Egypt’s cynicism, which led to their coach Carlos Queiroz being sent from the touchline for his persistent abuse of the fourth official, while another of his assistants, Wael Gomaa, was booked for the second time in successive games. Egypt won again on penalties, their sixth shoot-out success in a row.

There was no reference at all to the tragedy; the boards expressing solidarity with the families of the dead had been taken down and there was no minute’s silence, although there had been at each of the quarter-finals. The sense was very much of Caf looking to move on as quickly as possible. As the eyes of the world move back to domestic leagues and the Champions League, there is no reason to believe there will ever be a formal investigation or that any lessons will ever be learned.

So convinced were Egypt of their own victimhood that their coach Diaa El-Sayed called for the final to be delayed by a day because Egypt were tired after having played three periods of extra-time in a row and would have had a day less to rest than Senegal. Given Caf had inexplicably moved the third-and-fourth place play-off at the last minute, there was no guarantee they wouldn’t accede, but they did not.

The final, anyway, played out in an entirely predictable way, with Egypt spoiling and a weak referee in the South African Victor Gomes letting them get away with it. The ball was in play for only 40 minutes and 26 seconds of the 90, down well over 25% on what might be considered standard. Again, it’s hard to avid the sense of African football undermining itself: this is their showpiece and yet it was rendered almost unwatchable. At least three Egyptians could have been sent off, as could Sadio Mané. He missed an early penalty having allowed himself to be sucked into the mind game of Salah telling Abou Gabal which way he should dive, but after that the game slid into tedium, enlivened only by a brief late Egyptian flurry in which Edouard Mendy made two good saves and two free headers were missed.

Mohamed Abdelmonem pinged his penalty off the inside of the post from where it bounced clear, but Senegal squandered that advantage as Bouna Sarr’s kick was saved – the sixth penalty Abou Gabal had kept out in the tournament. All the momentum seemed with Egypt but then Mohanad Lasheen scuffed his kick and suddenly Mané had the chance to win it. He had missed against Cameroon in the quarter-final in 2017 and after his failure in the first half, the pressure was immense. But he took a long run, smashed his shot hard and low, and won Senegal their first ever Cup of Nations.

There is a large Senegalese community in Cameroon, which had meant their games were well-attended throughout the tournament. We happened to pass the Senegalese embassy on the way to the final: there were long queues outside of fans waiting for tickets and then boarding buses to take them to the stadium. They celebrated wildly, but there was still the opportunity for Caf to undermine their own product, making Senegal’s captain Kalidou Koulibaly leave the pitch and climb into the stand to receive the trophy alone from Cameroon’s 88-year-old president Paul Biya, who had arrived before kick-off and been driven round the running track waving from the sun-roof of his car to surprisingly rapturous applause.

But in the end, Koulibaly could rejoin his teammates to celebrate on the pitch and, despite the best efforts on hundreds of stewards, with the Senegalese fans. Their joy and the rejoicing back in Senegal was a reminder after all the dismal football, after Egypt’s disgraceful conduct, after all the logistical problems, of why football still matters. So at the last, there was redemption not only for Sadio Mané, not only for the Senegal manager Aliou Cissé, who had missed the decisive kick when Senegal lost to Cameroon in the final of the 2002 Cup of Nations, but also, perhaps. for football itself.

Jonathan Wilson writes for the Guardian and Sports Illustrated. He has written 12 books of football history including Inverting the Pyramid, Angels with Dirty Faces and Two Brothers. Streltsov is his first novel. @jonawils