Africa Cup of Nations

This will be the only time I ever write about soccer, ever.

Super Eagles! This was obviously the best picture I found when searching for a team logo.
Thank you to the forums of Nairaland.com

The Nigerian national soccer team is playing in the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) finals tonight. The team has done unexpectedly well in the tournament after years of mediocrity. This year’s success comes as such a surprise that Nigerian tv stations didn’t even bother to buy the rights to tonight’s game! Consequently, the only way to watch the game tonight is through a satellite provider. How crazy is that! Officials are still trying to work up a last minute deal to get it on the local stations, so let’s hope they figure something out.

Before the tournament started, we had asked one of the company’s drivers about Nigeria’s chances, and he didn’t exactly speak very highly of the team since they failed to even qualify for AFCON last year. The last time they won the tournament was 1994.  Nigeria does have one major international soccer star, Yakubu, but he makes the big bucks on a Chinese team and didn’t even bother to come back for the tournament. What a jerk! So the team is winning without their biggest star and still managing to defeat the really good countries that have had their international players active!

Despite my personal loathing for all things footie, we are planning to cheer on our adoptive country and watch the game with other fans down by the pool this evening. Ryan and I both made a conscious effort to wear green today to show our support for the team, but when we went down to lunch we found that we were the only people who had thought to do so. Good thing I decided to forego the face paint.

Side Note: The team they are playing tonight is Burkina Faso, a country that I had never heard of before last week. Over lunch with friends, we voiced the idea that maybe it was a new country that had formerly been part of Mali or Ghana or something. WRONG. Burkina Faso has been around since 1984 (says Wikipedia), and before then it was named the Republic of Upper Volta. Whoops!