17 Nov 2024

 A one-all draw against visiting Mauritania, Friday, leaves Botswana strongly optimistic about qualifying for AFCON 2025 finals, teetering on very fertile yet precarious grounds.

The Zebras are faced with a daunting task of either drawing or winning against Egypt away in Cairo on November 19 in order to qualify for the AFCON 2025 finals in Morocco. Either of the two results will take the Zebras’ hawk eye off the Mauritania vs Cape Verde game. But by all accounts, the Zebras must avoid a loss to Egypt.

A Zebras loss and a win for Mauritania would see the north west African side getting a nod through a head-to-head rule. Zebras lost 1-0 away to Mauritania before securing a draw back home this past Friday.

Perhaps not as daunting a task as it lives in our heads. Caretaker coach Morena Ramoreboli and his boys, by all accounts, are bullish going into the final game of Group C. However, this is the Egypt that drubbed the Zebras 4-0 in Francistown yet this result, with a new coach and challenge, may account to nothing.

The Zebras have managed seven points from five games and are second behind group leaders, Egypt who have mustered 13 points into their cart. Cape Verde and Mauritania have each garnered four points.

Steering the Zebras wheel, after then coach Didier Gomes Da Rosa ditched the role, Ramoreboli delivered a point that is keeping a nation hungry for a return to a continental showpiece nerve-jangled.

The Zebras last qualified officially for a maiden AFCON in March 2011 and partook in the ultimate 2012 Africa’s top most football tournament where they fell prey to Ghana, Mali and Guinea.

Ramoreboli will rely on the positives yielded from the encounter against Mauratania, where President Advocate Duma Boko, Vice President Ndaba Gaolathe, cabinet ministers and the leader of opposition inter alia attended to lend the boys support as they seek the second continental sojourn.

“If I were to put it in an arrogant way, I’d say the generation that the country has currently, they may not be big names, but they’ve got a very good attitude. They’re professionals and they want to win,” said coach Ramoreboli who will tap on the said attributes to push Zebras into a kick against the Pharaohs.

Flying to north Africa, Ramoreboli will have to stoke more the great attributes of the boys who ‘go an extra mile in making sure that they get a result for the country’ to force a result against the seven-time Africa champions.

“Playing away against one of the top countries in African football, we will have to orchestrate a proper plan for them. We will have to plan properly so that we can get some positive result,” added Ramoreboli who is a fulltime coach at Jwaneng Galaxy.

Alive to the galaxy of stars Egypt boasts, Ramoreboli is not timid. A qualification for AFCON 2025 is not a mirage and Ramoreboli is sanguine about the Zebras’ prospects of emulating the 2012 crop.

However, the coach recognises the difficulties of securing a positive result against Egypt although two of the three possible outcomes are in favor of the Zebras.

“To be honest with you, there’ll never be an easy match at continental level,” he said adding that Egypt, despite having qualified already, will have world and continental rankings to play for against a team that is tracking a sweet smell of qualification.

Against Mauritania, the Zebras stirred up some nail-biting moments that saw Mauritania goalkeeper, Niasse Babacar pull off lifesaving efforts for the visitors.

Omaatla Kebatho thought his header was set to kiss the net on the near post when Babacar sprung and stretched to parry it out, denying the home supporters a moment of euphoric glory. Coach Ramoreboli thought that at some point the Zebras were up against just the Mauritania shot stopper.

Just seven minutes from the 3pm kickoff, Aboubakary Koita drove a shot into the far post from a freekick to break the deadlock.

The goal that Ramoreboli lauded as ‘beautiful but with some element of luck considering the distance from the taker to the posts’ thrusted Zebras into laboring for an equalizer that eventually came ten minutes later through Gilbert Baruti.

Baruti struck a grass-mowing ball to the far post to beat the lanky Babacar.

The one-all scoreline ensued and endured from the 17^th minute until the 90^th when the Ethiopian referee Tessema Weyesa blew his whistle for fulltime. ENDS