Senegal reap rewards of sticking with trailblazer Aliou Cisse with Afcon glory in sight

Long-term loyalty to managers is not a characteristic for which African football is famed. Either side of their all-too-brief but dynamic stay at the Africa Cup of Nations, Nigeria announced two changes of manager, and there was still uncertainty on Thursday over who will guide them in next month’s World Cup play-offs against a Ghana team also bedding in a new boss.

To stay in the post of national manager for 70 games, the milestone Aliou Cisse will reach with Senegal in Sunday’s Afcon final, makes him a rarity.

He is also a native of the team he leads, which marks him out as unusual on a continent where the first instinct among leading clubs and the more successful federations seems to be to hire coaches from abroad, usually from Europe. It means that, since he was appointed in 2015, Cisse has been obliged to speak as a pathfinder, asked countless times why he stands out, being from Sub-Saharan Africa and in charge of a sub-Saharan national team.

“You need to put that to the directors of football around Africa,” he tends to reply. “I’m convinced there are many good coaches on our continent.”

Cisse is one match away from being regarded as not just a very good coach but the greatest in his country’s history, and it is a measure of his federation’s confidence in the 45-year-old that whenever he has fallen just short of a legacy achievement they have stuck with him.

He was the second manager to have led the country to a World Cup finals, but could not emulate the first — a Frenchman, the late Bruno Metsu — by taking Senegal deep into the knockout phase. In Russia in 2018, Senegal were stuck in their group by the narrowest of margins, the ‘fair-play’ tiebreaker: they had collected two more yellow cards in their matches than