Who needs goals? Certainly not Egypt and Carlos Queiroz after compelling Ivory Coast match at AFCON - The Warm-Up

THURSDAY'S BIG STORIES Who Needs Goals? Ad/> We got 240 minutes of AFCON yesterday, plus injury time, and did we get a single goal? Did we heck as like. Oh, sure, everybody tried to score one. Egypt even hit the bar.

But nobody could manage it. The entire point of the whole game, and nobody could come up with anything. Africa Cup of NationsSalah scores, Bailly misses in shootout as Egypt beat Ivory Coast to reach last 819 HOURS AGO But.

If for some reason you were trying to explain to a visitor from outer space exactly why football is both the best and the worst sport in the entire world, yesterday could provide you with exhibits A and B. For the goalless tussle between the Ivory Coast and Egypt was, in defiance of its scoreline, an intense and weirdly compelling thing. Each side pushed and pressed and was in turn pressed and pushed; the game was shaped not by goals but by the threat of them, by the absolute terror of them.

You probably couldn't call it exciting: not when the Ivory Coast had come to play and Egypt had come to stop them. But in its own way, a side striving for control and almost but not quite getting it is just as intriguing as a side trying, and failing, to score a goal. Perhaps.

At this point our friend from another planet raises two tentacles to their upper nostrils and emits a low beeping noise, which we think means «You're just trying to make the best of the fact that we have to watch Carlos Queiroz's Egypt again.» Maybe it's a crime, to take the best attacking player in the world and ask them to do this. Maybe it's a thought-provoking piece of performance anti-art. Maybe it's just Queiroz being Queiroz, the loveable, miserable old so-and-so.