I never thought that my fondest memory of a football tournament would be having a chair smashed on my back. But the beautiful game has a way of turning misery into ecstasy, and no other tournament has that effect quite like the Africa Cup of Nations.
It was the quarterfinals of the 2023 AFCON last year, and hosts Côte d'Ivoire were playing neighbours Mali. Unable to make the six-hour bus trip from Abidjan to Bouaké, where the game was being played, I decided to watch from a fan zone in Treichville, a residential neighbourhood of predominantly migrants on the central island of Abidjan in the Ébrié Lagoon that the city sits on.
Hours before kick-off, the fan zone was already filling up. With a DJ on stage blasting ‘Coup du marteau’, the tournament’s unofficial anthem, stalls selling grilled chicken, attiéké (fermented cassava root), mouthwatering alloco (fried plantain) and waiters moving through the crowd selling bottles of Bock lager and Beer Ivoire for about 50p a pop, it has a feel of a glorious party rather than a crunch knockout game.
That all changed when the game kicked off, and the nerves kicked in. Fans cheered every attack and despaired with every Malian venture forward. When Odilon Kossounou gave away a clumsy penalty, fans were on their feet in fury, and when Yahia Fofana made a brilliant save to deny Adama Traoré, the DJ turned on the music as the dancing began again for a few minutes.
