Querulous Queiroz and his histrionic Egypt have the smarts to outwit Senegal

Mohamed Salah against Sadio Mané, two great Liverpool forwards going head-to-head in Sunday’s Africa Cup of Nations final. It’s the headline clash of Egypt against Senegal, the meeting of the most successful side in African history and a team that has never lifted the trophy. But to focus on them would be misleading: although both have had an influence late in games, neither Senegal nor Egypt could be said to be teams based around their attacking talent.

There is an unavoidable sense that even to focus on the football is itself uncomfortable, given the tragic events of a fortnight ago when eight fans were trampled to death outside Stade Olembé, where the final will be staged. The quarter-final at the venue was moved, but after a review it was decided Thursday’s semi-final should be played there.

Emotionally that may have felt strange, walking across the road and through the gate where the tragedy occurred, but logistically it was almost certainly the right choice given the absence of viable alternatives for a major game featuring the hosts. Olembé is a magnificent stadium set in a vast amount of space; to create the conditions in which a crush could occur took spectacular incompetence. The extent to which lessons had been learned was difficult to tell on Thursday given only 24,000 turned up, seemingly put off by safety concerns.

The disaster rightly dominates any consideration of the tournament, but what happened a week gone Monday was just part of much wider chaos. The Cup of Nations is a competition that feels as though it always has to justify its existence; these last few weeks have not made much of a case either on or off the pitch. The organisation has been generally dismal while, not helped by some poor playing