By Duncan Shaw, DPA
Madrid : All over Europe for the next two months, several African footballers will be thinking long and hard about where to spend their winter.
The question that each one has to answer, individually, sometimes painfully, is: should I answer the call of my country and play for my national team in the African Nations Cup in Ghana in January?
The African players know full well that their European clubs don’t want them to be missing for up to five weeks at a crucial stage of the season.
Only this week Barcelona technical secretary Txiki Begiristain admitted to the media that he had asked Barca’s African stars Samuel Eto’o and Yaya Toure not to go to the continental championships.
Other European clubs will soon be putting similar pressure on their own African players.
But they are also under pressure from their national federations, from their family and friends, to heed the call and present themselves for action in Ghana.
And, in most cases, their instinct – not to mention their patriotism – tells them to go.
They are truly caught between a rock and a hard place.
I have a massive sympathy for these African players. They don’t want to damage their relationship with the clubs that pay them – but neither do they want to let their country down.
At the back of their minds, I suspect, is the thought that they would like to go home when their European careers have finished, many of them to use their savings to continue or start important social projects.
But I also understand their clubs. They are paying massive salaries to these Africans and are obviously loath to lose them for a month or more.
They are also worried about them returning in February not only tired but also maybe injured. Eto’o and Toure are both nursing muscle injuries at the moment, and Begiristain couldn’t resist pointing out that the Nations Cup might not help them to be in peak physical condition for the European spring sprint towards the trophies.
Eto’o – who annoyed many Barca fans by insisting on going to the 25th version of the tournament in 2006 – has so far not given any public reaction to Begiristain’s request.
But people close to him say that he is furious – and, true to form, could explode at any moment.
To add irony to indignation, Eto’o acquired Spanish citizenship on Wednesday, on the basis of ten years’ residence in the country. But the country in his heart, of course, will always be Cameroon.
Ultimately, of course, the Nations Cup chaos is the fault of FIFA. Joseph Blatter has been blathering on for years about creating a “unified global football calendar”. He has, to his credit, finally managed to align the European and South American national team dates, but the tournament is still out of synch with the rest of Planet Football.
Four years ago, I remember, the event provoked an ugly atmosphere in London.
In July 2003, Premier League giants Tottenham Hotspurs signed the Lyon-born Frederic Kanoute from West Ham United, then in the second division.
Spurs were furious, six months later, when the gangling, elegant striker insisted on playing for Mali – the country of his parents – at the 2004 Nations Cup. If we’d have known this was coming, ran the Spurs lament, we probably wouldn’t have signed him.
Kanoute’s four goals helped Mali to reach the semi-finals, one of their best performances since the tournament started in 1957. But he had fallen foul of the Spurs directors – and was soon sold on to Sevilla.
You could say that Kanoute has had the last laugh, scoring vital goals in Sevilla’s historic recent triumphs.
But Sevilla are certainly not laughing now, at the prospect of him missing five weeks of “Liga” action for the African Nations Cup again.