Shadow of death on Africa's football year

Shadow of death on Africa's football year

In the last hour, the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC) have claimed responsibility for a machine gun attack that greeted the Togo football team as they crossed into Angola for the Africa Cup of Nations.

With the Angolan driver killed, two players and seven others wounded, it is hard to imagine a worse start for what was meant to be Africa's football year.

The hosting of matches in the oil-rich territory of Cabinda is increasingly looking like a terrible idea on this dark Friday night, even here in the capital, Luanda.

For those searching for answers in Cabinda itself, and the four teams stationed there, kicking a ball must seem an impossibility.

Those teams are Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso and the unfortunate Togolese themselves.

Club sides are reluctant enough to release their players for international fixtures under normal circumstances.

Add bullets to the equation and it is hard to imagine that the employers of the likes of Emmanual Adebayor, Cote d'Ivoire's Didier Drogba and Ghana's Michael Essien will want their charges to be in Angola at all, let alone in Cabinda.

Manchester City's Adebayor was left apparently unscathed by the attack, in a physical sense. The mental damage suffered by all the Togo players, and those from other teams contemplating the next ride to training, will be hard to measure.

What must be certain now, after a similar attack on Sri Lanka's cricketers in Pakistan last year, is that top sportsmen and tournaments can no longer remain aloof from the brutality of human conflict.

The fighting that only officially ended in Cabinda in 2006 centres on the fact that the majority of Angola's oil originates in the tiny northwestern territory, which is cut off from Angola proper by a strip of land belonging to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

FLEC want an independent Cabinda with its own oil. It is hard to see how they could have made their point more forcefully then at the one time the eyes of the world were on Angola. As usual it is the innocent who suffer. A bus driver and a group of players pay the price for a gross PR stunt.

The tournament's organisers must now decide how, if at all, to go ahead with the Cup, which was meant to open the gates to the World Cup finals in South Africa in the summer.

As things stand, organisers are saying that the show will go on, with Angola due to take on Mali in the curtain-raiser on Sunday.

Here in Luanda, a frustrating day at being hundreds of miles from Cabinda, and a depressing day at blood spilled at the start of a celebration of football, is about to end with the cutting of the electricity at our remote hotel.

Tomorrow will shed more light on whether the dawning of Africa's year has turned out to be a false one.