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WE now know the teams we will play at the 2025 AFCON finals — South Africa, Egypt and Angola.
On Monday night, at the draw in Rabat, Morocco, our Warriors were pitted against Bafana Bafana, the Pharaohs and the Negras Palancas in Group B of the tournament which gets underway in Morocco in December.
The tournament will run from December 21, 2025, to January 18, 2026.
It’s a very tough group in which we will play the record African champions, Egypt, our perennial rivals South Africa and an Angolan side which topped their qualifying group.
But, when you get to the AFCON finals, you can’t expect an easy group and our lowly ranking, which saw us being thrust us among the weakest sides, meant we were always going to be up against it.
There are no easy games at this stage of football.
We are in the same 2026 FIFA World Cup qualifying group with Bafana Bafana and they won the first leg of our battles 3-1 in Bloemfontein last year.
We will now renew our rivalry at the AFCON finals which will feature 24 nations competing for Africa’s biggest football prize.
We have some unfinished business to deal with at the AFCON finals.
We have never reached the knockout stages of the tournament and we will be hoping that we will do so this time around.
We missed the last AFCON finals because we were serving a suspension from FIFA.
We had qualified for the last three AFCON finals, on the bounce, before our suspension, and that shows that we have come of age when it comes to this tournament.
What we need to do now is to make it to the knockout stages and that responsibility falls on our coach Michael Nees, who was at the draw in the company of new ZIFA president Nqobile Magwizi.
Nees has a chance to make history and become the first Warriors coach to guide us into the knockout phase of the tournament at his first Nations Cup finals.
It will not be an easy battle but we should be ready to embrace the challenge and nurse a dream that we can qualify from our group.
We can beat any of the three teams in our group, if we play to our full strength, and tournament football is not like league matches and if we get it right on the day we will be on the battlefield, we can get the results that we want.
We need to be brave and to believe that we are not a Mickey Mouse football nation and if we could draw against Nigeria in Rwanda in our World Cup qualifier, why should we not dream that we can beat Egypt, South Africa and Angola in Morocco?
All that we need are the right preparations and to give our coach all the support that he needs to build a team which can produce the Conderella tale of the 2025 AFCON finals.
Online Reporter