AN AFRICAN FOOTBALL DEBACLE
by Dr ‘Tunde Adelakun
Assistant Coach, Benin national football team
There is always this notion that African football is struggling to grow not because of a lack of talent on the continent, but more because of the football administrators that sometimes govern the game, in custody of the game and how it is run.
Sometimes it’s like having a beautiful car -an elegant car made for luxurious conditions and then thrusting it in the hands of a poor and very rough driver who is installed as the car’s owner. Of course he will know the value of his car but he will misuse it, drive it rough because he doesn’t have the wherewithal to do otherwise.
African football is the car, the elegant car. And the custodians of the game are sometimes the ones acting like the carefree owner and driver who seems hellbent on destroying the car.
The question is why?
We have seen a lot of wrong in the game. And we have seen some advancement over recent years.
One thing that seems to have missed the boat of recognition of importance, is hostility in international football, where host nations seem to be empowered to annihilate the mental and physical well-being of visiting teams in order to gain an advantage.
We read about it a lot but we don’t seem to do enough about it. It is commonplace in CAF Champions League and Confederation Cup where visiting teams always allege that their hosts have been unsportsmanlike towards them. During the COVID pandemic, nations employed all sorts of shenanigans to gain a point of two here and there.
But despite us knowing that they did, we refused to punish clear and obvious atrocities and set a deterrent against further abuse.
In the recently concluded AFCON qualifiers, I was a living witness to such incidence and it brought me to think – are we being vigilant enough to take note and take appropriate steps to stop it getting worse?
The Nigerian team – the Super Eagles – went for a game in Libya in October and their ordeal was very well documented. Eighteen hours in a remote airport with no access to food or drink was catastrophic and had really bad consequences.
At the end of the saga, Libya was found culpable. They were fined. And they lost the game as CAF awarded Nigeria the 3 points and a 3-0 win.
Was that it? Will it stop others doing it again? What if the country in question wasn’t playing for anything anyway and those 3 points meant nothing either way? They would do it again.
If a team or country is guilty of something, our leaders should call a spade a spade and not be scared of dishing out the right punishment where appropriate.
Where a super rich club or country flouts the rules of ethics in the game, and you slap them with a £1,500 fine, they will pay it easily without knowing they took anything from their purse.
When Libya was found ‘guilty’ of meting out inhuman treatment to the Nigerian Super Eagles in October, they got fined a rather lenient $50,000 and forfeited the match to their Nigerian counterparts.
Surprising as this was not enough of a deterrent. It still put them in a good position to fight for what points were available to qualify for the AFCON. And they were still allowed to entertain teams in their country, leaving them with a chance to do the same as what they did to Nigeria to other teams.
And they did!
Against Benin, having secured a most surprising win away in Rwanda in the penultimate fixture, the Libya team suddenly found itself within touching distance of a qualification berth in the 2025 AFCON scheduled for Morocco.
They just needed to fine tune their antics and beat the Benin team and hope the other result in Nigeria goes their way. Neither happened. They didn’t beat Benin nor did the other result go their way.
But in the aftermath of that game in Tripoli (Libya v Benin on 18 November) we started to see why CAF should have gone in stronger on the Libyans to serve as a deterrent to others and to stop them being the way they were against Nigeria.
Having lost the qualification ticket, the Libyan fans resorted to violent attacks on the Benin team. Even during the game, on four occasions, streakers invaded the pitch and ran the whole length of the field unchallenged by the authorities (and it begs the question – what if one of them was carrying a weapon and hurt someone on the pitch? The security operatives just watched on as the disruption happened – four times during the game.
Post the game, immediately after the final whistle was blown, all sorts of objects were thrown in the direction of the Benin team. We had to scamper into the dressing room for safety, where we were holed up for more than an hour and a half as the crown refused to disperse from the entrance to our dressing room.
After a while it was declared safe to come out and that was when it really became bizarre!
There was a line up of policemen guarding us as we came out of the dressing room, forming something of a guard of ‘honour’ as we walked between them and entered the team bus.
Once we were all in and we were about to shut the door of the bus,
Then four policemen climbed on to the bus – four policemen…not fans, not supporters….POLICEMEN with batons, and started swinging their batons at our team. Coach Gernot Rohr, who was in front of the bus, took the full hit….was struck no less than EIGHT times…..baton blows aimed at his head but be managed to raise his hand and most of the blows landed on his forearm and his shin. Such presence of mind to raise his hand and legs to guard against being hit on the head in the midst of the shock of seeing policemen attack our bus, was remarkable.
When they got bored, they disembarked and we moved. We had police escort but were unsure as to where the escort was leading our bus since their colleagues just came, unstopped, unhindered, to beat us up. Our bus was pelted with all sorts of objects. We all went down on the floor of the bus, not knowing whether the sound of the missiles being thrown at the bus was of objects or bullets. It was bedlam in the bus.
Thankfully we got to our hotel, and even to come down and have dinner was a struggle, as we were unsure of how friendly or hostile the hotel will be towards our team.
The next day, the team was meant to disperse from Tripoli, at different flight times, to our respective destinations, but having seen what happened, the government of Benin decided that it was safer to get us all out of the country as a group, all at once on a charter flight, all back to Benin before we all depart from there to our respective destinations.
Even at that, we left the hotel in the dead of the night, at 3:00 am to ‘sneak out’ of the country in case the Libyans would try anything funny the next morning. But rather we were kept at the airport for another 10 hours before we were allowed to leave.
You can imagine the relief when the plane taking us out of Libya actually lifted off to take us away from the country.
So I talk about vigilance….paying attention to the issues, and the issues behind and in front of the main issues. CAF seemed to address the issue in isolation – Nigeria was harmed, and Libya was punished for what it did to Nigeria.
What we did not do was address what could also happen in the future if Libya had a chance to dish out similar treatment to others. Was the punishment enough to make them stop themselves from being the way they were against Benin?
Should Libya have been allowed to host a game in Libya so soon after they were judged culpable in their actions only a month earlier?
We really need to be vigilant, to be observant, and to be wary. When Nigeria tried to land their plane in Benghazi and were told not to, they circled a bit and easily could have run out of aviation fuel, causing catastrophic disaster along the way. Lives could have been lost.
Last week, when pitch invaders came on to the pitch during Libya v Benin, four times…not just once….a life could have been lost. If the police baton had hit Coach Gernot Rohr on the head a few times in that moment of rage by the policeman in the Benin bus, life or lives might have been lost. If someone on the bus had reacted to the policeman hitting their coach, and policeman draws his gun, it might have been bloodshed and mayhem.
What I am saying here is…..we do not have to wait for lives to be lost before we take preventative action against countries, clubs or people that do not demonstrate fair sportsmanship.
Let’s be vigilant, let us take note and act decisively to avert further disaster.