2006 Wcq [r]

Here are the results from October 10th-11th:

October 10th

Guinea-Bassau 1-2 Mali

October 11th

Tanzania 0-0 Kenya
Uganda 3-0 Mauritius
Madagascar 1-1 Benin
Seychelles 0-4 Zambia
Sao Tome e Principe 0-0 Libya
Botswana 4-1 Lesotho
Niger 0-1 Algeria

There will be 11 more matches today. And I would just like to add that I have been very disappointed with the lack of interest of these matches by both people on BS and by the sites covering the matches. It seems like almost noone cares and yet these matches are just so huge. Every team that doesn't advance out of this first round won't play a really competitive match for 2-3 years. Plus these are World Cup qualifiers and mean a lot. BBC has been the only one even sort of updating these matches, all the other sites I have aren't updating anything, cafonline doesn't even have anything even on the matches, it's absurd. Not to mention that maybe 1 person will even read this cause almost noone comes in here...I'm sorry but this whole thing is really a disgrace.

Another result from Saturday:

Equatorial Guinea-Togo 0-1

Source: http://www.rdasilva.demon.co.uk/football/wc/wcq2006.html

Uganda 3-0 Mauritius

Yay!!!!

I am interested.

Carry on, please.

Sao Tome e Principe 0-0 Libya


Sao Tome e Principe is the smallest country in all of Africa. It is basically two islands in the Gulf of Guinea (right on the equator) and has a total population of just over 175,000.

Libya has a population of almost 34 x the size of Sao Tome e Principe - this has to be one of the more shocking results.

And if you want to use the Fifa World Rankings which are crap ....

Libya 93
Sao Tome e Principe 194

This has to be one of the more remarkable results I have ever seen.

Some other results form the first legs - from Soccernet.com

Zimbabwe 3-0 Mauritania
Ethiopia 1-3 Malawi
Swaziland 1-1 Cape Verde
Rwanda 3-0 Namibia
Burundi 0-0 Gabon

Interesting that a lot of teams scored 3 goals this weekend:

Uganda
Zimbabwe
Rwanda
etc

Here are the rest of the results for the weekend

Gambia 2-0 Liberia
Congo 1-0 Sierra Leone
Guiena 1-0 Mozambique
Chad 3-1 Angola
Sudan 3-0 Eritrea


And as always, team listed first is the home team

The Liberia result not a real shocker considering the mess that the country is in.... that is one of the more interesting senarios with African football - coups and government collapses can affect the process every once in a while

What about Somalia x Ghana?

I believe that both legs are going to be played in November, IIRC

What else do you want me to say? African football seems like it's none-existent to most people, and the only time anyone makes a big fuss about anything most of the time is when the match is over. There was little to no preview of the matches this past weekend (with the exception of the late article fifa.com posted and it was like the day before) and the coverage by bbc was slower than usual. I mean, they had Guinea-Bassau having defeated Mali 2:1 then midway through the day Saturday switched it to Mali 2:1...not to mention that they were posting results of matches when they were not results and it was driving me nuts. Plus, this whole time it seemed like nobody cared about these matches, no articles written, nothing. And how cafonline.com can not even mention the matches going on is hard to imagine.

I'm sorry for all you that posted this past day in this thread cause at least you are showing you care about these matches. But you have to agree, African football coverage on the net is really lacking and it's wrong.

Well I too agree with you, desertfox2. As a mod here for a few years now, it gets really disheartening and I go through periods when I don't post much of anything. I guess that's depression. A few of the reasons why this is so:

1) The internet has nowhere near the presence in Africa as a whole compared to the first world. A few countries are pretty net-sophisticated (like SA) but they are the exceptions. I tend to post and lurk on those local message boards.

2) Folks in Europe and especially USA have little understanding of Africa. Furthermore I don't see folks there having much interest in educating themselves either. This of course goes beyond just soccer and, yes, includes a healthy slice of racism. As a moderator on the FIFA board I have been continually appalled about some of the comments by posters here about Africa. Then I remember that hardly anyone here (the US) has been there (Africa). The ignorance is monumental.

And a prime example of the apathetic coverage. the score was reported wrong the other day Libya won 1-0 away at Sao Tome - so I guess there goes the impressive result.

Heck, the coverage of the American games is terrible too, so i would expect this to be as it is. As far as most people are concerned, football is only played in Europe and South America. that is going to continue to be the case until someone out of these areas wins the WC. horrible, but true.

I actually just came from an African history class I'm taking at college and I'm amazed every day about how little people know about Africa. I mean, there are many people here in the states who think Africa is a country which I don't even know how to respond to it's so stupid. And I agree that racism has a lot to do with it and it's really sad to see it. At times I'm embarrassed to be an American because of the lack of knowledge and more importantly the lack of careness that people have to appreciating Africa.

But to get back to what I was saying earlier, it's ridiculous how sites can't even get the scores right of matches. So far BBC has been horrible in the fact that they have gotten 4 results wrong in these qualifiers. Here is what they said compared to another couple of sites that I have just looked at today:

What BBC said:

Equatorial Guinea 0-1 Togo
Guinea-Bassau 2-1 Mali (which they later changed to 1-2)
Sao Tome e Principe 0-0 Libya
Botswana 3-1 Lesotho

What fifa.com and a couple other sites have said:

Equatorial Guinea 1-0 Togo
Guinea-Bassau 1-2 Mali
Sao Tome e Principe 0-1 Libya
Botswana 4-1 Lesotho

Now, I am running a prediction contest over in the FIFA and tournaments forum and when stuff like this happens it ticks me off cause now I have to make so many unexpected switches. I can't even imagine them making this many mistakes for EURO 2004 or something. I mean, imagine 2 days after the England-Turkey match they said oh btw, Turkey happened to win that game 1-0 I think a lot of people would be ticked off. I just can't understand how getting a correct result is so hard. Now I just have to hope that these results are right. It's totally absurd and completely unexcusable.

Yeah, I expected Angola to win there.

yes they are

I will post these 2 results here, just to show I am interested in this Africa WCQ

Algeria - Niger 6-0 (first leg 1-0, aggregate 7-0)
Algeria qualified
Mauritania - Zimbabwe 2-1 (first leg 0-3, aggregate 2-4)
Zimbabwe qualified