Guest Post by Laurent Dubois
There are some matches that end up seeming primarily the vehicle for one person to somehow attain mythical status. The Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern was written, it seems now, purely to allow Didier Drogba a form of poetic catharsis worthy of fiction or film. The fact that Chelsea won was itself a kind of oddity, for throughout the game it seemed the most unlikely of outcomes. But as he had against Barcelona, Drogba became the master of the unruly and the absurd: none of what the other team did, not of the great passing and possession and continual shots on goal, mattered in the end. Just Drogba did, his head and then his foot.
Drogbacite
May 22, 2012 By 2 Comments
Drogbacite
May 17, 2012 By 2 Comments
This weekend Chelsea play Bayern Munchen in the European Champions League final. One player whose contribution is likely to be decisive is the Ivorian Didier Drogba. Cup finals always end in triumph or disaster, and Drogba has made a habit of exaggerating those extremes, either scoring the winner or else missing a penalty or getting himself disastrously sent off. Above is a clip of Drogba doing the rounds of English chat shows. [Read more...]
The 10 best goals scored by African players in the Premier League
May 13, 2012 By 6 Comments
Ever since Rupert Murdoch invented football in 1992 (see Fivers passim), African players from all over the continent have lit up the English Premier League and helped turn the competition into a continent-wide obsession. (Just last week, Arsene Wenger said he had been “frightened” by the intensity of Arsenal’s popularity in Nigeria and Kenya.) African players have also scored some memorable goals in the process. So while the Premier League was busy anointing Wayne Rooney’s jammy overhead shinner from last season as the official “Goal of the 20 Seasons”–presumably only fans under the age of seven were allowed to vote?–we put the question to Twitter: What is the greatest goal scored by an African in the English Premier League? As the final day of this 20th season begins, here’s the run-down of the 10 biggest goals scored by African players in the Premier League.
The African Cup of Nations preview
January 20, 2012 By 3 Comments
The 28th edition of the African Cup of Nations kicks off in Gabon and Equitorial Guinea tomorrow. 16 teams–including the joint hosts who did not have to qualify–will play for 2 places in the final match scheduled on February 12. The big question is, of course, who will take the trophy.
Didier Drogba, Politician
December 14, 2011 By 1 Comment
Despite his brilliance as a footballer, a lot of people can’t take footballer Didier Drogba serious. For starters, what’s with that wet curl?
Africa’s best soccer football players are West African
December 5, 2011 By 6 Comments
On January 10 next year FIFA will announce its World XI 2011. The result, they remind us, will be based on voting by over 50,000 professional soccer players from around the world. “Every voting player selects one goalkeeper, four defenders, three midfielders and three strikers.”
The 3-year-old award feels like another one of those endless FIFA awards created to showcase sponsors’ products. But I’ll take it.
The news is that FIFA just announced a shortlist of 55 players from which the final 11 players for the World XI 2011 will come from.
Gbagbo’s Elections
October 31, 2010 By 4 Comments
It’s been 10 years since Cote d’Ivoire’s presidential elections; “… a whole lost generation since the days when Côte d’Ivoire was West Africa’s most prosperous and promising nation.” The last election cycle was postponed indefinitely by the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo (of the Front Populaire Ivorian) when his term ended in 2005. In the meantime he plunged the country into civil war (in 2002). The election will hopefully unify the country’s north and south–divided since the civil war. Expectations are that Gbagbo–who is in a three-way contest with former president Henri Konan Bedie and Alassane Ouattara, a former prime minister–will be re-elected. Quite a cast of characters: Bedie invented of “Ivorite,” a xenophobic policy aimed at excluding immigrants or those from mixed backgrounds (with parents from Burkina Faso, Mali, etc) from political life. Gbagbo never denounced the policy (its cited as a contributing factor to the 2002 northern rebellion against his regime). Only “real Ivorians” were allowed to vote. Ouattara was excluded from running for president in 2000 because he was not considered a “real Ivorian.”
* Don’t expect too much in-depth reporting in English language media about the Ivorian elections. (The latter care more about the US midterms, later this week, and the second round of Brazil’s presidential elections, also today.) Best to regularly check sites like Global Voices or AllAfrica.com. Follow the African Elections Project’s Cote d’Ivoire elections updates on Twitter. There’s also the English services of French language media like Radio France International. Finally a group of local web activists has set up a citizen reporting platform to monitor elections using the Ushahidi platform.
Credit: Cartoon by Le Monde’s Telex.
Golden Ball
October 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Didier Drogba (Ivory Coast), Samuel Eto’o (Cameroon) and Asamoah Gyan (Ghana) made this year’s shortlist for FIFA’s Ballon d’Or Award. Of course Gyan won’t win the prize. Eto’o has a better chance as he won the Serie A, Coppa Italia and Champions League treble last season as part of an incredible Inter Milan team.
