Senegal is looking forward to the first "African joy"... and history is biased towards Egypt to celebrate the eighth title

When the Egyptian and Senegalese football teams meet tomorrow in the final match of the thirty-third African Cup of Nations (Cameroon 2021), each of the two teams will be on a date with writing history by achieving the last step in the struggle for the continental title.

The Egyptian team (the descendants of the Pharaohs) will clash with its Senegalese counterpart (the Teranga Lions) at the “Olympic” stadium in the Cameroonian capital, Yaounde, in the first confrontation between the two teams in the final of the tournament, despite the two teams meeting four previous times in the history of the tournament.

Both teams are looking forward to writing history through this confrontation in Cameroonian soil, where the Pharaohs dream of enhancing their record in the number of times winning the title, and winning the championship for the eighth time in history, while the Dakar Lions hope to win the continental title for the first time after they had luck twice before, in which the team reached the final .

The Pharaohs holds the record for the number of times to win the continental title with seven titles won by the team in 1957, 1959, 1986, 1998, 2006, 2008 and 2010.

The ambition of the Pharaohs supports that the team made its way to the final after three difficult tests in the playoffs, with which the viewers’ viewpoint differed from the team’s after the modest start in the group stage.

History stands on the side of the Pharaohs in terms of the success rate in the final matches of the tournament, as the team won the title seven previous times, while it ranked second twice in 1962 and 2017, knowing that the team won the title in 1959 without playing a final match, as the tournament was held at the time with a league system of one role between the teams The three participate in that version.

On the other hand, the Senegalese team lost the title in each of the two editions in which it reached the final in 2002 and 2019, despite the strong nominations that accompanied the team to the tournament in both versions.

With reaching the final in the current edition, the Senegalese team has become the team that has reached the most final without winning the championship, which it seeks to change tomorrow.

The team had lost the final of the last edition against its Algerian counterpart in Egypt, but it seeks to avoid what happened with the former Ghanaian and Nigerian teams, as the first lost the final in two successive editions in 1968 and 1970, and this was repeated with the Nigerian team in the 1988 and 1990 editions.

Among the four previous confrontations between the Egyptian and Senegalese teams in the African Cup of Nations, there were three confrontations in the group stage, where Senegal beat Egypt 1-0 in the 1986 edition in Cairo and the Egyptian team won the championship title, while the Egyptian team defeated its Senegalese counterpart with the same result in the copy 2000.

The third confrontation between the two teams was in the group stage of the 2002 edition, and Senegal won 1-0, and the Senegalese team reached the final of the tournament, while the most important confrontation between the two teams was in the golden box of the 2006 edition in Egypt, and the Egyptian team won 2-1 before winning the title in the final.

And the balance of the two teams may seem tied in the previous confrontations between them in the championship, but the 2006 match favored the Pharaohs' hand relatively, as it was the only previous one between the two teams in the playoffs.

But the Pharaohs first need to deal again with the physical aspect in order to face the fitness of the Teranga Lions, who played their match in the semi-finals last Wednesday, while the Pharaohs played their match in the same role on Thursday. The Egyptian team also played 120 minutes in each of its three matches in the playoffs, while the Senegalese team decided His three matches in the playoffs are in original time.

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