The dangers of Eurocentric journalism

So Egypt won again. Obviously.

For some reason a horde of European journalists – the average ones – had the Ivory Coast and Cameroon as favourites to win the tournament, presumably because Ivory Coast have two Chelsea players, one Gunner and some guy who plays for “Barsa” and Cameroon have Samuel Eto’o.

These so-called “experts” appear to avoid any in-depth analysis of African football when they write their opinions, looking only at the European context. In spite of the logic of analysing teams according to certain accepted criteria, they fail to lay any importance on the lack of depth in the squad, the lack of quality players in most positions or even on the fact that footballers who play away from home understandably play differently on their own continent and in front of their own fans. How can having Drogba or Eto’o make you the favourites if they are backed up by a bunch of players who are average at best? What does the Premier League or Serie A matter in an African competition?

Before the quarter-finals a lot of European journalists had Angola, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Nigeria as the semi-finalists, completely against the evidence of history, statistics and form. Of course the first three lost while Nigeria only scraped through on penalties after a goalless draw. Ivory Coast offered no more than cynical kicks and girly scratching (Nkoulou, Song and Bedimo) while Cameroon divas Eto’o and Geremi were not so much average as almost instrumental in their side’s defeat.

Commentators pointed to one refereeing decision in the Egypt-Cameroon game but even they had to grudgingly admit that two of the goals were down to goalkeeping blunders while the other goal was Geremi’s fault and his alone. Egypt played the better football, their only weakness being a certain level of sloppiness in front of goal during the ninety minutes.

A note to the Eurocentric hacks: find answers to the following questions – before this year’s CAN, who had won the most tournaments? Who was second in the rankings (finish reading the questions before you wet yourselves)? Who had appeared in the most finals? Who had won the last two tournaments? That way you won’t be surprised at the names of this year’s finalists.

And perhaps that way you can avoid picking Australia or Honduras as favourites for the World Cup just because they have a handful of players in England.