Afcon 2023: Morocco pushed to the limit in feisty draw with DR Congo

The warnings had been abundant in the first nine days of the Africa Cup of Nations. There really are very few lightweights left on the continent. Almost everybody who has overcome the long miles of travel and awkward acclimatisation to make the last 24 of the new, expanded format has enough competitive nous to feel they belong.

The upstarts have made the running. Cape Verde reached the second round before anybody else, victors over Ghana on matchday one. Mozambique were leading Egypt until into stoppage time. Namibia have recorded a historic first win at a finals.

Some of older warnings are also being heard - about how a regional hierarchy still governs, depending on where Afcon is staged. Tradition has it that, more often that not, to travel down from the north to an Afcon hosted in the sub-Saharan region is to add an impossibly heavy burden to the sum of challenges facing a potential winner.

It cuts both ways. In the 30 years since Nigeria lifted the 1994 title in Tunisia, the pattern of there being champions from west or southern Africa when the hosts are sub-Saharan and winners only from the Mena countries when the staging country is from the Mediterranean region has been broken only by one country. That was the remarkable, dynastic Egypt who claimed four Afcons in the space of 12 years, including the victories in 1998, in Burkina Faso; 2008, in Ghana; and 2010, in Angola.

Nobody since has so much as hinted at a sequence like that. But then no Afcon contender had entered a Cup of Nations finals with quite such a fresh endorsement of tournament expertise as the current Morocco, World Cup semi-finalists 13 months ago.

But yesterday Morocco too learned that the coming weeks will test them as intensely as anything in