Morocco Is the Best Team in Africa: A Senegalese and African Point of View

Some sentences write themselves. This one I carried around all evening, from the moment Morocco's third goal silenced Houston.

Morocco beat Canada 3-0 on Saturday — a brace from Azzedine Ounahi, a stoppage-time dagger from Soufiane Rahimi — and the Atlas Lions are back in a World Cup quarterfinal. For the second tournament running. No African nation had ever done that. Not one.

I am Senegalese. So you know exactly what that opening sentence costs me, and you know why.

Let's not pretend. On January 18, in Rabat, Senegal won the Africa Cup of Nations final on the pitch. Pape Gueye's strike in extra time, 1-0, a trophy lifted under North African stars. Two months later, a CAF ruling stripped our Lions of that title and handed it to the beaten finalist, on the grounds that our players had walked off the field in protest at a penalty awarded in the dying seconds of normal time. The case now sits before the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Senegalese supporters spent months in Moroccan jails over that night's disturbances. Hard words have flown between Dakar and Rabat — and between our diasporas too, in the cafés of Paris, in the WhatsApp groups of Milan and Brussels, everywhere our two peoples live side by side.