Too Bad They Are Going to Miss Out on the Competition

The indomitable Lions started the second part of the African Nations Cup/World cup 2010 qualifiers by losing their first game to Togo by 1-0 on a neutral ground. They followed that performance with a 0-0 draw with Morocco at home in Yaoundé, giving them just 1 point out of a possible six in a group in which just one team is to qualify for the 2010 world cup competition in South Africa.

They just hired a new coach in Frenchman Paul Le Guen but that would be reacting a little bit too late in my opinion. The team has been good for a very long time but it has also been plague by constant problems. The best example has to be when the team qualified for the 2002 world cup that was held in Japan and South Korea. The team was at its peak at that time, just coming off back to back African nations cup victories in 2000 and early 2002. The main problem that they had at that time was one of money. It looked like at the time the authorities in charge were very slow in making payments to the players and the team got held up in France on their way to the Far East.

Their first match in that competition was against the Republic of Ireland. They showed up just 24 hours before kickoff in that game and ended up pulling a one all tie on their way to crashing out of the competition in the first round. You could just see the fatigue in the players during the second half of play in that match against the Republic of Ireland.

After that competition, tragedy struck when Marc Vivien Foe collapse and died on the pitch during the confederation cup in 2003 and the team has never been the same since then.

The current coach is coming in with the ambition of taking the team to the World cup in South Africa but he is coming in a little bit too late. For some time now the public has been screaming that the players are getting old and change needs to be made but nobody in the Football authorities was listening. The team made it to the finals of the 2006 African Cup of nations in Ghana, but they played a totally different type of football to make it that far into the competition. If you watched the team during their 2000 and 2002 run they were dominating teams during the African cup of Nations competition. That was not the case though in the 2006 competition held in Ghana. Egypt exposed the team greatly and coach Otto Pfizer had to go very defensive in the later part of the competition for the team to make it that far.

The team did qualify for the second round of the current qualifiers, but they had some close calls with some very weak teams. They pulled a tie with Cape Verde away from home and had to be rescued by a late Samuel Eto-o goal to beat Cape Verde by two goals to one in the returned leg match at their home field.

The team started making changes recently but that was after their poor result during the first two games. Now they would have to win the remainder of their games to get a chance at qualifying. That is going to be very difficult considering the fact that the team is having problems both defensively and offensively. During the games against Togo and Morocco, very few goal scoring chances were created and this is not something that a new coach is going to fix right away. Also the new players that are going to be brought in would need some time to blend as a unit. The new coach would be lucky if the team qualifies for the African Cup of Nations competition in Angola next year. They need to finish third out of four teams to make it into that competition.