April 25, (THEWILL) – The most successful national female football team in Africa, the Super Falcons of Nigeria, reaffirmed their status by comfortably qualifying for the TotalEnergies 2022 Africa Women’s Cup of Nations (AWCON), which is scheduled to take place in Morocco between July 2 and 23. The 14th edition of the highly coveted continental female football competition is organised by the Confederation of African Football (CAF) and, like the men’s competition, it is a biennial international football championship organised for the women’s national teams of Africa.
As part of the programme of events leading up to the kickoff of the competition, CAF will sort the qualified teams into groups for the preliminary stage of the tournament. This draw has been moved from the initially scheduled date and has now been fixed for Friday, April 29. It will take place at a ceremony to be held at the Mohamed VI Complex in Rabat, Morocco at 9 pm local time.
As one of the 12 teams that made it to the continental competition, Nigeria’s Super Falcons, will fancy their chances of another AWCON-winning tournament, especially as it is not being hosted in Equatorial Guinea. The rationale for this hope is historical. Of the 13 previous times the AWCON, which was previously known as the African Women’s Championship, the ladies from Nigeria have won it 11 times, only missing out on the continental trophy in 2008 and 2012, when the Equatorial Guinea hosted and won. Still, Nigeria went home with the bronze medal in 2008 and ended up in the fourth position in 2012. This time around, Equatorial Guinea failed to qualify for the Morocco tournament. The teams that made it to AWCON 2022 and who will be in the draw with Nigeria include hosts Morocco, Uganda, Burundi, Zambia, Senegal, Togo, Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Botswana, Cameroon and South Africa.
The AWCON competition presents a more compelling attraction for these dozen teams involved. The tournament doubles as the African qualifiers to the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup to be hosted by the pairing of Australia and New Zealand between July 20 and August 20 next year. Rather than struggle through another rigourous qualifying series, the top four teams from Morocco 2022 will qualify for the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, and two more teams will advance to the inter-confederation play-offs. More than any other factor, the potential of reaching the world cup incentivised the African teams to put in maximum efforts to reach Morocco and will hopefully make them exert every drive they can muster to finish within the bracket of teams going to represent their countries on the grandest stage of female football in Australia and New Zealand.
That effort will include trying to put a dent in Nigeria’s distinguished record in the annals of the African female football history. Apart from dominating the continental competition, winning 11 out of 13 so far played, the Super Falcons are defending champions of AWCON. In the last competition played in 2018, which Ghana hosted from November 17 to December 1 and which featured eight teams, Nigeria picked up her 11th overall AWCON title by defeating one of her strongest continental rivals, South Africa, via penalty shootouts as the final tie ended goalless after extra time. Although Nigeria’s Onome Ebi missed the first kick, the Super Falcons scored the remaining four while Banyana Banyana missed two to lose out. The Falcons are also the only women’s national team from the CAF region to have reached the quarterfinals in both the FIFA Women’s World Cup and the football event at the Summer Olympics.
Yet, even as the dominance of the Nigerian ladies is inarguable, the quality of female football across the continent has witnessed an uptick that has cut into the gap between the Super Falcons and other national teams. In the qualifying series for the AWCON, for instance, Nigeria was drawn against Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. In the first round of the series, against Ghana, Nigeria lost the reverse fixture 1-0 away to the Black Queens but because they had triumphed over Ghana in the first leg at home by a 2-0 margin, with Uchenna Kalu scoring both goals in the first half, they had the upper hand with a 2-1 aggregate over the two legs. However, Nigeria improved on that performance in the second round of the series. They squared up against the Ivorians, the team that denied them a place in the recent Olympics in Tokyo, Japan, and beat them home and away, albeit with small margins. Ifeoma Onumonu netted a brace in Abuja for a 2-0 win and Ijeoma Okoronkwo scored late in the reverse tie in Abidjan to give Nigeria a 3-0 aggregate win and progress to the AWCON in Morocco.
The closing gap in the quality of women’s football in the continent that directly challenges the dominance of he Super Falcons was in stark relief in September last year at the maiden edition of the Aisha Buhari Invitational Cup, organised by the Nigeria Football Federation to celebrate the girl-child and encourage more girls to take to football. In the upset at the final game of the competition, the Super Falcons fell to a disappointing 4-2 defeat in the hands of the impressive ladies from South Africa, the Banyana Banyana, who lifted the maiden trophy at the Mobolaji Johnson Arena in Lagos. The ladies from the Rainbow Nation had sounded a note of warning of their rising superiority on the continent to the entire set of invited countries when they soundly beat the Black Queens of Ghana 3-0 in their first game in the competition, while Nigeria was struggling to get a 2-0 win over Mali. Goals from Linda Motlhalo, Gabrielle Salgado, Mamello Makhabane and Michelle Alozie’s early own goal ensured Desiree Ellis’ side outscored the African champions despite a maiden brace from Vivian Ikechukwu.
The Randy Waldrum-led team may have picked up valuable lessons from that competition and applied to the remainder of the AWCON qualifying series to securely punch their ticket to Morocco but there were more lessons ahead. The NFF agreed to have the ladies participate in Canada’s Women’s National Team Celebration Tour to celebrate the Canadian Ladies Olympic gold medal victory at the Tokyo Games in Japan. It was a high-calibre, double-header friendly with which the Falcons could fine-tune their strategies, cohesion and formation tactics ahead of AWCON. The initial match, the Falcons went toe-to-toe against their hosts, and finished the first half goalless even if they conceded twice in the second half for a 2-0 Canada win. Yet, there was a lot to be consoled about in the loss given that the Super Falcons had their chances and patches where they matched the Canadians in quality to Waldrum’s pleasure.
In the second leg of this international friendly, Canada’s women’s soccer team did not have as easy a time against Nigeria’s Super Falcons as they did in the first, even though defensive loopholes allowed the North Americans to salvage a 2-2 tie. The Super Falcons, who are ranked 39th in the world, dominated the second half, but a late Shelina Zardowsky equaliser denied the Nigerians a memorable win over the sixth best team in the world and reigning Olympic champions.
At the end of the friendlies, Waldrum’s confidence in the ladies, which he amply demonstrated in his post-match remarks after the first loss, was justified. Part of the chinks that will require extra work to knock the team into the best shape for AWCON will be to shut down all defensive lapses that allowed Canada to come from behind twice. The team has until the start of July to work on improving the porous defense and other weak departments as focus turns to defending their continental title in the African Women’s Cup of Nations in Morocco.
Jude Obafemi is a versatile senior Correspondent at THEWILL Newspapers, excelling in sourcing, researching, and delivering sports news stories for both print and digital publications.
