The draw was conducted in Accra yesterday as we went to press so by now we should know who Egypt will be grouped with in the African Nations Cup beginning in January in Ghana. However, going by the mediocrity of the squad these days, even if the three teams we are to face in our group are the Three Stooges, we would still be lucky if we got past the first round. Our insipid football showed embarrassingly against Botswana last Saturday in the final qualifying game. We won 1-0, which put us in the ANC. but barely. We were only two points ahead of Botswana before game time, and while we needed only a draw, and Botswana needed a tiny miracle to beat Egypt in Cairo, we were forced to wait until the 78th minute before scoring, from a substitute no less, to get some breathing space. In Egypt s defense, nine players out of 14 who took part in the game were not members of the team that snatched ANC gold on home soil 21 months ago. But take another look. Our woeful play continued against Japan against whom we were demolished 4-1 in a friendly on Wednesday. We went to Osaka without Ahly players who make up the bulk of the team - they have African Champions League commitments - and nobody from our European-based contingent were on hand. But Japan, too, had the same excuse, themselves fielding a team of second-stringers. Egypt went to great lengths to make the issue of qualifying for the ANC as dramatic as possible. We booked the last available berth, with 13 out of the 16 teams going to Ghana already having qualified before the Botswana game. Among those who beat us first to Ghana were Benin, Mali and Namibia, all with brief soccer histories. We, on the other hand, the defending champions of Africa, had to keep it to the end. It was never seriously in doubt that we would qualify for the ANC. Our qualifying group of Botswana, Burundi and Mauritania was so weak that we would not have done better had we ourselves selected the group we wanted to play in. We have won the ANC five times; none of the others have won it even once. We had gone to the ANC a record 20 times - it s now 21 - whereas none of the others had ever even been to the ANC. We are 43 in the world. You would need binoculars to see where Mauritania stands (140), and 20/20 vision to spot Burundi at 110 and Botswana 95. But the huge difference in statistics and history neither rattled our group mates nor prompted us to play well. Out of the six-game qualifying campaign, only in a handful - 4-1 against Burundi and 3-0 facing Mauritania - did we give convincing displays. We tied each of the three countries in games away from Egypt. You might think that s good but in Ghana we will be away from Egypt and playing countries far superior. The scary question is: If our first team cannot do the job in such a frail ANC qualifying group, and because our second team in Japan was so inept against another second-tier team, what s going to happen to us in Ghana against the likes of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Guinea and Cameroon, and our friendly neighbors of the Maghreb Tunisia and Morocco? And looking a little further down the road, how are we expected to qualify for the even greater prize, the 2010 World Cup? Egypt has one more chance to right itself when it plays in the pan-Arab Games which we are hosting next month. To date, only seven countries have announced their participation in the football program and we still don t know how many, including Egypt, will field full-strength squads. Nevertheless, it will be good practice for Egypt which will need all the practice it can get, and all the luck in the world, for what lies ahead.
