African Cup Of Nations 
/ Jonathan Wilson / 24 January 2012 / Leave a Comment 
Lille's Moussa Sow is due a big performance for Senegal
"The sense is of a backlash coming, and it may be Nzalang Nacional who bear the brunt of that."
Equatorial Guinea somehow won their first match but we didn't find out too much about how good they are. Senegal on the other hand lost their opening match but there were signs they're about to improve. A win here can get them right back in the tournament, says Jonathan Wilson.
Was it a freak? Equatorial Guinea beat Libya in their opening match at the Cup of Nations, defying the gloomy prognostications that had been coming out of Spain, where the bulk of the squad is based. This, after all, is a disparate bunch of players - only two of the 23 were actually born in Equatorial Guinea, neither of whom were in the starting line-up on Saturday - and they had been playing under their new manager, the Brazilian Gilson Paulo, for only a fortnight. He himself admitted he has had very little chance to impose his personality on the squad. It shouldn't have worked, and yet it did, the opening game bringing forth an outpouring of national pride that swept Equatorial Guinea to victory.
Their second game sees the Nzalang Nacional face Senegal, who began with a 2-1 defeat to Zambia. Senegal were desperately poor in the first half of that game, caught on the break again and again by Herve Renard's well-organised and cohesive Chipolopolo. In the second, though, they regrouped and laid siege to the Zambia goal, and were probably a touch unfortunate to only pull one back.
Perhaps the sight of Christopher Katongo, darting in from the wing to create the play behind the pacy 21 year old Emmanuel Mayuka, will inspire Equatorial Guinea. After all, Libya for much of that opening game looked the better, more composed side, but their patient passing got them nowhere, and it was the direct enthusiasm of the hosts that won out, the goalscorer Javier Balboa and the left-winger Randy frequently unsettling the Libyans by charging straight at them. Randy's performance was particularly eyecatching and not a little odd, his surges creating the impression of him having been a constant threat, even though he completed only a little over 60 per cent of his passes. Senegal, though, surely can't be as bad again.
They were third favourites at the start of the tournament, largely thanks to their wealth of attacking talent - Demba Ba, Papiss Demba Cisse, Mamadou Niuang, Moussa Sow and Souleymane Camara. In qualifying perming three from five worked and they rattled in 16 goals in six games, but in that first game it looked like too many similar players all squabbling over the same space. Introducing Ba may have made sense in terms of recent club form, but it's hard not to wonder whether that disrupted the flow that had carried them through the qualifiers.
"We lost a battle, not the war," insisted Senegal's coach Armand Traore. "It'll wake us up, and that's going to help me a lot on the psychological front. We turned the page on the Zambia match on Sunday morning, holding a debriefing on what needed to be fixed. My talk to the team was based on the fundamentals: passing, working as a unit...to be aggressive."
The sense is of a backlash coming, and it may be Nzalang Nacional who bear the brunt of that. Senegal's midfield, once it started to play, denied Zambia any space to run in the second half, and if they can do the same against Equatorial Guinea, it's hard to see how the hosts could score. Libya's patient approach told us little about how Equatorial Guinea react when put under pressure, and it may be that the initial adrenaline of that first game cannot be recreated in Bata this evening. Expectation, anyway, applies its own pressure.
RECOMMENDED BET:
If you want to play it safe, Senegal at [1.76] to win seems a touch on the long side, the results in the opening games perhaps having influenced punters against the Lions of Teranga. For something a little more ambitious, Senegal to win at -1 goal on the Asian handicap is [2.5].
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