Afcon 2023: Morocco must be bold and courageous to replicate success of Qatar 2022

Walid Regragui is a hero for his continent. To see a sculpture of him, distinctive beard and smooth pate, on show in an art market in San-Pedro, where Regragui’s Morocco are based during the opening phase of the Africa Cup of Nations in Ivory Coast, is to appreciate the wide impact he has made over a relatively short time.

Regragui has been recognised and celebrated as the pathfinder for unprecedented regional success, since, at the last World Cup, he was the first coach to guide any African or Arab team to the competition’s semi-final stage.

Starting Wednesday, he seeks to build on that, to complete a personal trilogy by adding an Afcon title to the African Champions Cup he won at the helm of Wydad of Casablanca a few short months before being asked, with little preparation time, to take the national team to Qatar 2022, there to make history.

In some respects, the Afcon target can look like the toughest task of the three. Morocco are chronic underachievers at this event – their sole triumph that of 1976 – and it is a shortfall Regragui’s coaching staff are presenting to players as a personal challenge.

“Here on the staff, Walid, the assistant coach Gharib Amzine and myself have all made mistakes at Afcons that we don’t want to see repeated here,” said Rachid Benmahmoud, another one of Regragui's assistants.

Between them, as players, Regragui, Amzine and Benmahnoud lived through a series of disappointments at four Afcons between 2000 and 2006, a gloomy run of three group-stage exits, and just one respectable placing, the silver medal achieved with Regragui as Morocco’s busy full-back in 2004.

Fresher in the rear-view mirror is the quarter-final defeat to Egypt in Cameroon two years ago. Romain Saiss, the captain then and