African Cup of Nations Semi-Finals Today

By: Laurie | February 7th, 2008

Daryl is merrily live-blogging the Ghana-Cameroon semi-final game over at World Cup Blog as I’m writing this. Here’s a quick cut-and-paste from his preview yesterday:

For the record that’s the hosts versus the all-time Africa Cup of Nations top scorer.

Ghana have hit form at the right time and will have plenty of vocal support tomorrow. They won’t have captain John Mensah though, so Claude Le Roy will have to decide whether to ask Michael Essien to cover in central defence or whether he’s needed more in midfield (I say midfield.) Cameroon may have Samuel Eto’o but they haven’t looked quite as impressive and were somewhat fortunate to wriggle past Tunisia in the quarterfinals. But they certainly have a determined manager. Otto Pfister was for some reason locked out of the Ohene Djan stadium before his team’s training session yesterday, so the 70-year-old had a good swear at police until the gates were unlocked. You tell ‘em Otto.

Current score as I’m typing is 0-0, but that could change any second, so get over and watch the action. Liveblog is here.

In a few hours, at 12:30 pacific or 3:30 Eastern, I’ll be liveblogging Cote d’Ivoire vs. Egypt. In general I hate liveblogging (I’m not a good multi-tasker,) but I have loved liveblogging the African Cup of Nations. Fast, exciting, high-scoring soccer. (The goalkeepers are blaming the balls for all those goals. And believe it or not, science is backing them up.) I’d love it if you’d stop by the liveblog to keep me company in the comments.

Daryl’s preview of this game:

Didier Drogba and friends are scoring goals like there’s no tomorrow and Ivory Coast look to have arguably the most attacking options of any team at the tournament, but they’re still waiting to see whether defensive colossus Kolo Toure is fit enough to play. Egypt were slick against Angola, but have had a run of relatively easy games since beating Cameroon 4-2 in the opener. The team has no obvious weaknesses, and has all kinds of creative talent (Hassan, Aboutreika etc) so tomorrow we’ll find out if Hassan Shehata (the last African coach standing) and his men have what it takes to go all the way.

Both games promise to be exciting.