Gambia face tough path to 2015 Africa Cup of Nations

Scorpions of The Gambia

The Scorpions’ road to the 2015 African Cup of Nations finals in Morocco is set to commence in May 2014 with a preliminary round of qualification.

The Confederation of African Football (CAF) on Monday released a new system that placed Gambia into the preliminaries and ultimately laid out a challenging route for the Scorpions to Morocco next year.

The qualifying format that was approved during CAF’s Executive Committee meeting held last Friday, differs from the ‘Pools’ format that had been decided in January last year.

The qualifying draw will be conducted on April 27 in Cairo, Egypt, after which Gambia will be able to know their preliminary round opponents.

If the Scorpions manage to negotiate their way out of the preliminaries that could pit them against two formidable outfits, they will join one of the seven groups that will comprise of four teams each.

The two top teams of each group will then qualify for the Nations Cup directly, along with the third-best placed team from the seven groups.

Unlike in the past where qualifiers have run the course of approximately a year, the 2015 qualifiers will be held in just three months (September, October and November).

And for that reason, Scorpions head coach Peter Bonu Johnson is aware that he will need a pool of over 30 players to successfully negotiate the fixture congestion.

To achieve this, he will have to choose the best performers in the local league and bind them with the cream from the diaspora before May when the Scorpions are expected to play their first preliminary game.

How Gambia ended up in the preliminaries:

Out of the 51 countries engaged in these qualifiers, the top 21 teams listed in the CAF ranking shall automatically qualify for the group phase.

The seven others partaking in the group phase shall be determined following the conclusion of the preliminary rounds, held from May to August 2014.

The top 21 countries were determined by a total points tally gathered from performances over the three previous Nations Cup tournaments (2010, 2012 and 2013), qualifiers to these editions, as well as the qualifiers to the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

The most recent editions were given more weight in determining the seeded teams. The 2013 edition’s points were multiplied by 3, the 2012 by 2 and the 2010 edition by 1.

Countries that qualified for the World Cup were offered seven points, play-off finalists five; then second, third and fourth placed teams in the group stages were accorded three, two and one point respectively.

After the above process, Gambia was placed 35th on the table with just 3.5 points. It means Gambia could face any of the teams that were placed 22nd and below.

And this could lead up to fixtures against either the likes of Libya, Equatorial Guinea, Botswana, Malawi, Uganda, Mozambique, Benin, Sierra Leone, Congo, Central African Republic, Liberia, Zimbabwe, Benin, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania or Guinea-Bissau.

Nations that have already automatically qualified for group stages are Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Zambia, Burkina Faso, Mali, Tunisia, Algeria, Angola, Cape Verde, Togo, Egypt, South Africa, Cameroon, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Gabon, Niger, Guinea, Senegal and Sudan.

The 2015 Africa Cup of Nations, which will be the 30th edition of the Africa Cup of Nations, will be played in Morocco, who qualifies automatically as hosts.