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Africa Cup of Nations 2010 - blog
Scheduling madness
by Paul Myers
Article published on the 2010-01-12 Latest update 2010-01-12 11:58 TU
Off to Benguela for the Group C matches between Egypt and Nigeria, and Mozambique against Benin, Tuesday afternoon and evening, respectively. But in one of those quirks of scheduling, there was a choice before I came out to Angola, between watching the opening matches in Group B in Cabinda on Monday, or seeing the defending champions start their campaign on Tuesday. I chose to see Egypt. And as we know, the story was in Cabinda.
Hindsight is a cruel taskmaster.
The world was looking in on Cabinda as Burkina Faso took on Cote D’Ivoire. It ended in a 0-0 draw, which is something of a surprise, since Cote D’Ivoire are among the favourites for the title.
Officials from the Confederation of African Football and the Angolan authorities probably didn’t care about the result. They were more interested in the fact that it took place without any further untoward incidents.
Anything dodgy would have left a lot of people with some serious questions to answer.
Not to trivialise things too much, but you can get why certain elements in Cabinda want to be separate from Angola.
The chiefs of the FLEC separatist movement have probably tried to get out of Luanda airport on a domestic flight.
It is not a thing of beauty. The 10:30 flight on Monday was moved to 3pm, so I went back to the hotel to catch up on the sleep that I’d missed.
When I returned to Luanda airport, the time vortex I mentioned in an earlier blog engulfed us in the terminal for domestic flights.
Luggage weren’t sucked in. It was us poor sap travellers. At least the waiting concourse had a bar, relatively savoury toilets and air conditioning.
However it didn’t have anyone from the TAAG - Angola Airways - to tell us why we were being delayed.
There wasn’t even a TV to show us what was going on in the Algeria v Malawi match at the national stadium in Luanda.
Well, the plane left without any apologies or explanations from TAAG, just after 5pm , and eventually we swept into Catumbela, the airport for Benguela at 5:30pm.
Without going into details, it was the best part of the day for a 40-minute plane ride. Is this just bad luck or something structural?
I am due to head back to Luanda on Wednesday afternoon, so I’ll have a better chance of knowing the answer to that.
I’m feeling up beat though because I don’t want to become enmeshed in the Afro pessimism mentioned by the South African president Jacob Zuma following the attacks on the Togo team buses last Friday.
But even he must know there is a huge difference between being down on a continent and merely highlighting incompetence or a lack of civility.
Talk to any Angolan and their craving for this tournament’s success is visceral. Their mantra is: ‘we’ve come a long way. We want to be about more than civil war.’
No sane person would stand against a popular dream like that.
But the gleaming new and expensive Chinese-built stadiums and roads will be nothing more than an ostentatious empty parade if no cash or effort is spent on installing a tradition of capacity and competence.
