Ivory Coast contest the 34th Africa Cup of Nations final when they welcome Nigeria to the Stade Alassane Ouattara-Ebimpé on the outskirts of Abidjan.
This will be the 15th time the hosts have had the opportunity to contest the tournament final, and the first since Egypt defeated Les Elephants to win their fifth crown in Cairo 18 years ago.
Considering the intoxicating highs of the last week, it’s become easy to forget just how bleak things had become for the West African giants earlier in the campaign, and how astonishing their run to Sunday’s date with destiny has actually been.
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Cast your minds back to Jan. 24, only 18 breathless days ago. This was the lowest ebb. The Ivorians had been smashed 4-0 at home by Equatorial Guinea, ranked 88th in the world, and had just parted ways with their head coach Jean Louis Gasset. At the time of the Frenchman’s exit, on the back of their underwhelming group-stage campaign, the Ivorians didn’t yet know that they would progress to the knockout stages.
By the final whistle of their disastrous outing against Equatorial Guinea, they required a series of results in the other groups to go their way in order for the hosts — with three points and a minus three goal difference — to advance to the round of 16 as one of the three lucky losers.
With calculators firmly at the ready in the Ivorian team camp, one by one, those results came in, with qualification eventually being confirmed only hours after Gasset’s departure, as Morocco defeated Zambia 1-0 in San-Pedro. The Elephants found themselves progressing — statistically the worst ever group stage team to do so at a Nations Cup — but without a head coach.
It’s at this point that Gasset’s erstwhile assistant Emerse Faé, a 40-cap utility man for the national side during his playing career, steps firmly into centre-stage, as the Ivorian Football Federation turned to him to hold the tiller to see out the rest of the campaign. Now, the Ivorians are referring to Faé as the “Special One,” even though he’d never managed a full senior competitive game before Jan. 29.
As I wrote on Feb. 3, following the Elephants’ shock round-of-16 elimination of tournament holders Senegal, it was difficult to pinpoint exactly which had been the most astonishing element of the hosts’ campaign at that point. Was it the historic 4-0 battering by Equatorial Guinea, the dismissal of a head coach mid-tournament, progressing despite their miserable record, the late equaliser and penalty shootout victory of Senegal?
The quarterfinal against Mali took things to another level. Ivory Coast, in truth, looked jittery and nervous despite dispatching the reigning champions, with the hapless Odilon Kossounou seeing red in the 43rd minute during a horror display, with Mali earlier having had a penalty turned down by VAR, before missing another after the defender’s first bookable offence.
In the intense heat and humid conditions, going down to 10 men looked fatal for the Elephants, particularly when Nene Dorgeles opened the scoring 71 minutes from time. Buoyed on by an electric crowd in Bouaké, however, Simon Adingra equalised in the 90th minute to take the contest to extra time, but with the 10-men Ivorians increasingly sapped, it appeared only to be prolonging the inevitable.
