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| The Blue Sharks are now friends of The LOSE. These guys are awesome. |
It all started badly for the Blue Sharks, however, in CAF Group B. Africa has five places in Brazil and the 40 qualifiers were divided into 10 four-team groups, with the group winners advancing to a final series of home-and-home playoffs to earn their spots in the World Cup. The Blue Sharks were beaten 2:1 at Sierra Leone and lost 2:1 on their home grounds, the Estádio da Várzea in Praia, to perpetual top-flight African side Tunisia. They then had a rather contentious third match on March 24 in Malabo, losing 4:3 away to the Equatoguineans, dropping them to 0-0-3. At 0 pts. and -3, they were pretty much eliminated from the competition.
During this key third match, Blue Sharks defender Fernando Varela was sent off for “unsporting conduct towards a match official.” There is a great scene in the movie Bull Durham where Crash Davis gets tossed for calling the umpire a cocksucker – the 100% guaranteed, surefire way to get run by an ump. The LOSE knows from his days of playing basketball that calling the referee a motherfucker is a guaranteed way to get T’d up. The LOSE is not sure what the magic words are which will get you red carded in football, and especially doesn’t know what they would be in Portuguese, the national tongue in Cape Verde, or in French, as the referee of this match in question was from Mali. Referees have, however, been known to study up on derogatory terms in foreign tongues prior to the game, so as not to let guys get away with talking shit. Or maybe Varela just called him a motherfucker straight out in English, that term having taken on some rather universal usage by now.
Whatever it was that he said/did, Varela got tossed and his behaviour earned him a four-game suspension as well. Not that it mattered, since the Blue Sharks were out of the competition at this point after a tough loss to the Equatoguineans, whose victory was primarily due to a hat trick scored by Emilio Nsue.
Who is, by the definition of FIFA, a Spaniard.
Welcome to the mess.
Recruiting foreign players is apparently nothing new in Equatorial Guinea. The rules seem straightforward enough, in principle – a player has to be a) born in a country, b) have a parent from that country, or c) have spent two years in that country. And yet rules for who is and who isn’t eligible to participate for a national team have not always been universally applied nor enforced by FIFA, due in part to the fact that it’s not always so simple to figure out. Football has always been a game of the masses – which, in the rest of the world, means the poor: migrants and immigrants and transitory populations whose movements aren't always that easy to document or track. And what further complicates things is that once you’ve started playing for a national team, you cannot switch. Even the most sophisticated national federations in the sport sometimes get flummoxed and come to discover a talented player actually technically isn’t a citizen. Figuring out who is and isn’t eligible can be tricky even if you’re organized and paying attention to these sorts of things.
And organization has always been rather lacking in African football, a wonderful game played by wonderfully talented players who seem to be undermined at nearly every turn by federations that are corrupt, disorganized, and dysfunctional. The LOSE is a big fan of the African game. I love me some Elephants and Super Eagles and Black Stars. But virtually every major African competition inevitably gets mired in some sort of squabble or bickering or infighting, often times involving paying the players (or some governing body or another refusing to do so). It all can be wildly entertaining, and yet it’s also quite sad. The game is administered by far too many would-be tycoons and grandstanding Ministers of Sport – big fish in small ponds caring far more about their own personal fortunes than anything else. The prevalence of said Ministers is particularly problematic, as matches take on even more of a governmental air than is the norm. FIFA strives to keep government politics out of the sport, but such set-ups make it almost impossible to do so.
So far this World Cup qualifying cycle, there have been SEVEN cases of African teams fielding ineligible players. The devil is in the details, and the recordkeeping doesn’t always match the bravado of the boss. The penalty for this is a 3:0 forfeit loss. FIFA doesn’t differentiate between those who don’t understand the rules and those who attempt to game the system, nor should they. Most of the time, I believe it’s the former. But in the case of Emilio Nsue, he was born in Mallorca and had made 51 appearances for Spanish age-level national teams. So it’s not like he is an unknown commodity. The Equatoguineans have been trying to persuade him to play for them for years – he turned down a chance to play in the 2012 African Cup of Nations, which the Equatoguineans co-hosted with Gabon – and he seems to have come back around to the idea of playing for Nzalang Nacíonal only when the hopes of someday playing for Spain have completely dissipated. Suffice to say, this was not going to be a particularly difficult case for FIFA to figure out.
Nsue captained the squad and scored three goals in the 4:3 win over the Blue Sharks in March, and then was out on the pitch on June 8 for the rematch with the Blue Sharks in Praia, a 2:1 win for the hosts which was essentially meaningless for all involved. The suspended Fernando Varela was not on the pitch for the Blue Sharks. Nor was Fernando Varela on the pitch a week later, a 1:0 win for the Blue Sharks over Sierra Leone that also meant nothing because the Blue Sharks were on the outside looking in. They were stuck on 6 pts. and -1 goal difference and trailing Tunisia’s 11 pts. and +4 with only one match left to play. Mathematically eliminated.
Until July, when they weren’t mathematically eliminated any more, because Nsue was ruled ineligible.
The results of both matches between the Equatoguineans and Cape Verde were thus officially awarded as 3:0 victories for the Blue Sharks, so Cape Verde picked up 3 extra pts. and a whole lot of goal difference. Suddenly, Cape Verde were sitting at 9 pts. and +5, and they actually had a chance to still advance. Their one game left was at Tunisia, where a win was unlikely.
But given a choice between slim and none, slim is the better option. (Yes, I just linked to Tunisian television. This blog just gets better and better.)
The LOSE loves the minnows, of course (as evidenced by my fondness for the Ultimate Good Guys this past summer in Brazil). There are usually one or two who find their way into the World Cup somehow, often in implausible ways, and they add some unpredictability and joie de vivre to the affair. Among those minnows who still have a chance to swim with the big fishes in Brazil next summer are Iceland, who are somehow in second place in a completely strange European group, and Jordan, who are ranked 73rd in the world but get to play a home-and-home with a South American team TBD in November for a spot in Brazil. Winning the World Cup is not really the point for nations such as these. (Nor should it be the point for much of anyone, to be honest, since only eight nations have won the damn thing.) The point is to get there, to be on that big stage for three games and to leave a legacy.
Cape Verde is a small, island nation of 500,000 people, and their shock 2:0 win over Tunisia in Radès was a cause for national celebration and joy. It’s a cool little country. Reaching the World Cup would be a great achievement for the Blue Sharks and for the nation as a whole, and now they were merely two games away from it.
But there was one problem: Fernando Varela was in the lineup for Cape Verde in that game with Tunisia. You remember him. He’s the guy who is suspended.
Apparently, the thinking in Cape Verde was that since the matches with the Equatoguineans had been declared forfeits, which means all individual statistics from the matches don’t count, Varela’s suspension therefore didn’t count either. Which isn't an unreasonable assumption, I suppose, but you might want to, oh, READ THE RULES FIRST. From FIFA’s Clause 18.4: "an expulsion automatically incurs suspension … even if imposed in a match that is later abandoned, annulled and/or forfeited."
And so the game, of course, goes down as a 3:0 win for the Tunisians, since the Blue Sharks fielded a suspended player who was ineligible.
How do you say "facepalm" in Portuguese? Or, better yet, how do you say "clusterfuck?"
I feel bad for the players, who were essentially administered into losing a golden opportunity. There is no excuse for that sort of thing. It’s ultimately the responsibility of coaches and administrators and clerks to figure this stuff out. It’s bad enough to get beat on the pitch. It’s worse to get beat a week later in a conference room in Switzerland. The Blue Sharks are a whimsical and jovial lot who deserved a fate far less vexing and confounding than this. It’s a big disappointment for a small country, as they now must give up their playoff spot to Tunisia. Not that I have anything against Les Aigles de Carthage. Given the state of affairs in the country, Tunisians could use a little good news right now.
And, really, that fact makes it easy to root for all 10 African sides left in the competition – all of those nations could use an infusion of joy and national pride to make day-to-day existence there a bit more palatable. Of the 10, two of them – Burkina Faso and Ethiopia – survived having to forfeit matches for using ineligible players. The latter case is particularly noteworthy in that the Walia Antelopes thought they’d wrapped up their group with a game to play. Their raucous 2:1 win over South Africa in Addis Ababa (thanks to one of the greatest own goals in history) set off delirium, as Ethiopia’s footballing fortunes have generally been terrible of late. Only then did they discover a rather boneheaded error – Minyahile Beyene had accrued too many yellow cards and was to serve a suspension in a June 8 game vs. Botswana, yet no one involved with either the Ethiopians or CAF seemed to notice, so there he was out on the pitch in Botswana. Uh, whoops. With the 3:0 forfeit loss, Ethiopia had now unclinched. But they had a chance to redeem themselves in their final match, an away game at the Central African Republic – which was playing an away game themselves. Apparently, you lose your right to host matches when you’ve got coup d’états and civil insurrection going on. The Ethiopians won the game 2:1, which was played in a vast, nearly empty stadium in Brazzaville. It’s fair to say that the CAR supporters didn’t travel in great numbers.
And along with the pair of forfeit survivors you also have Senegal, which doesn’t get to host a match in their home-and-home playoff with African kingpins Côte d’Ivoire. This is because there was a riot in the stadium the last time the two teams met in Dakar.
In summary, everyone’s nuts. Sounds about normal.
