Lexlin-Elvin Siamah Esq @Lexlins

Totally missed your response. But this isn’t about pride, @garyalsmith. It’s about false narratives being given the time of day. Underdogs lose leads to favourites. Everywhere. In every confederation. When Japan lost a 2–0 lead to Belgium, people praised Belgium, gave Japan some slack and moved on. Nobody indicted Asian football. Croatia scored first and lost yesterday. It’s football. But I find the way you build this supposed 30-year pattern strange. Your most obvious pull was Nigeria in 1994. So I went back and checked the actual data. All of it. Since 1970, African teams have taken the lead in 79 World Cup matches. They won 44, drew 21 and lost 14. That means African teams avoided defeat 82.3% of the time after taking the lead. Even in this tournament, the full picture is different from the story being told. Yes, Côte d’Ivoire led and lost to Germany. DR Congo led and lost to England. Senegal led and lost to Belgium. But Morocco led and drew with Brazil. Egypt led and drew with Belgium and Iran. Cape Verde led and drew with Uruguay. Algeria led and drew with Austria. South Africa led and beat South Korea. Côte d’Ivoire led and won two games. Egypt led and beat New Zealand. Senegal led and beat Iraq. Ghana led and beat Panama. Algeria led and beat Jordan. So African teams have led 15 times in this tournament: 7 wins, 5 draws and 3 losses. That is not a continental pathology. That is football. And if this were an African problem, Africa should at least be uniquely bad at it. We aren’t. From 1970 to 2022, African teams lost 17.2% of World Cup matches after taking the lead. AFC teams lost 20%. CONCACAF teams lost 23.4%. Even if we start from 1994, your 30-year window, it is CAF 16.4%, AFC 20% and CONCACAF 22.9%. So where exactly is this unmistakable African pattern? You have built a continental theory from a few painful games spread across decades. To do that, you have to ignore Algeria holding against West Germany in ’82. Cameroon repeatedly holding in ’90. Nigeria seeing off Spain in ’98. Ghana killing games in ’06. And just four years ago, African teams led nine times at the 2022 World Cup and didn’t lose once. Cameroon held against Brazil. Tunisia held against France. Morocco held against Belgium, Canada and Portugal. That was four years ago. Not 30. And before someone says these numbers are inflated by games against weaker opposition, let’s narrow the sample further. Let’s look only at games where African teams took the lead against European and South American opposition. Since 1970, it has happened 53 times. African teams won 27. Drew 14. Lost 12. That is a 77.4% non-loss rate after taking the lead against the two historically strongest footballing regions in the world. So what you have identified is not a pattern. It is a highlight reel of pain with the denominator deleted. Yes, the collapses were real. Senegal’s was bad. DR Congo’s was bad. Côte d’Ivoire’s was bad. But Japan’s against Belgium was bad too. Croatia scored first and lost. Spain’s collapse against Nigeria in 1998 was spectacular. The difference is that those failures were attributed to the people who actually oversaw them: the players, the coach, the team. Nobody said, “Croatia blew a lead, so Europeans lack concentration.” Nobody built an Asian theory from Japan doing it more than once. As for the coaches you cite, Thiaw was diagnosing Senegal’s game management. That was his team in a game his team blew. Senegal is a team. Africa is a continent. A coach owning his own failure is accountability. Stretching it into a verdict on 54 countries is your addition, not his. And that is my pushback. You may be coming from a place of good intentions. But Africa, and I must say this to you as an African, is diverse. Sometimes coaches make bad decisions. Sometimes players panic. Sometimes underdogs sit too deep. Sometimes the better team comes back. Sometimes a team just blows a lead.

Gary Al-Smith @garyalsmith

4 months ago

I mean, if you are ignoring 30+ years of actual patterns in the World Cup, then yeah, it's not much of a big deal. ThEy JuSt BlEw a LeAd. Or, use any search engine and pull out the numbers going back, showing an unmistakable trend among African teams. I'd recommend Arrigo x.com/agyeitah/statu…

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5 months ago

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