When the curtain falls on Egypt’s Africa Cup of Nations on Friday night, the overwhelming sense among many local residents will be one of relief. Senegal and Algeria will contest the final but there is a feeling, at the end of a hastily arranged tournament that divided home supporters and saw their team fall short of expectations, that the past month is best swept under the carpet. The country sought political capital from extending the arm of help to its continent when Cameroon was stripped of hosting rights last year, but the gains have been hard to discern.
“Nobody can deny the fact there’s a connection between politics and the organisation of this tournament,” said Ziad Akl, an analyst with the Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. “The national discourse overshadowing this whole thing is that this is a matter of patriotism, not a matter of football.”
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