I dare you to predict

I love predicting scores of football matches. It’s fun! You get to play “prophet” if only until the end of that 90 minutes. In fact I have a column in the “Weekend Star” Newspaper in Kenya where I predict scores of English Premier League, Kenyan Premier League and recent African Cup of Nations matches. Most of the time I’m wrong, but it’s still a blast.

A few people take it way too seriously when my predictions go wrong but honestly, how does anyone really know how many goals will be scored in a game and by each side? When it comes to the EPL, I write as a Gunner, but when it comes to African and Kenyan football, I try not to let emotions rule.

For the last 10 days or so SuperSport presenters and analysts have been “predicting scores” of various matches in the 2012 Afcon. Most of us have our predictions etched in ink on SuperSport.com under the “games” section. I’ll tell you here and now, few of us have been right.

I’m not surprised about all the wrong predictions because, since the qualifiers, little has gone as predicted.

Right from the beginning it was predicted that Cameroon, defending champions Egypt and Nigeria would have made it to the tournament but they didn’t.

From the first game of the tournament it was clear that very few people expected Equatorial Guinea to win a game, let alone the opening fixture. In fact I really doubt the president’s son expected the team to win when he offered a million dollars for a win. Yes there were pundits who said they could win because they were playing at home, but it wasn’t a realistic assessment. Now we find Equatorial Guinea meeting Ivory Coast in the quarterfinals. I can bet that few people outside of the host nation would predict that Equatorial Guinea can beat Ivory Coast.

We all know the story of Senegal and every honest analyst’s belief that they were one of the tournament favourties. There were more predictions in Senegal’s favour in their opening match against Zambia but again we all know how that story ended.

From Group A, all predictions were in favour of Senegal and Zambia going through to the quarters but we have Zambia and Equatorial Guinea.

Predictions on Group B were that Sudan would be smashed by Ivory Coast and that Angola or Burkina Faso would definitely be one of the teams that would join Ivory Coast in the last eight. Not so. The whole of East Africa celebrated as Sudan managed a draw with Angola and the win over Burkina Faso that saw them go through to the second round.

By the time we got to Group C, pundits began to get a little more adventurous. Equatorial Guinea’s victory attributed to home support, allowed for Gabon to be given more credit from the onset. However with Tunisia and Morocco in that group, deep down it was believed that the two North Africans would sail through in this group. But not only did Gabon pip Morocco to a place in the finals, they got three wins out of three; beating group favourites Tunisia. Again many analysts were proven wrong.

Group D was the most straight forward with Ghana always expected to sail through; although they took time to really settle in the tournament. This group also went down to the wire and many people would not have believed that Botswana would still have an outside, unrealistic but mathematical chance of qualifying as they kicked off their last group match. But that’s the nature of football; unpredictable.

Eventually though, despite Guinea’s exemplary 6-1 victory over Botswana, I personally thought they played a lot better than Mali. Mali had beaten them and that was their downfall. If asked before the tournament started, the odds would probably have been in favour of Ghana and Guinea.

So we enter the quarterfinals this weekend with a few “outsiders” in the quarterfinals. I just want to ask the fans not to take predictions from analysts too seriously. Who really would be able to not only predict the winner but the score-line as well?

Predicting and playing prophet, if only for a while, is great fun! We all do it and very often we’re all wrong. But hey, it’s still fun.

For the record, I urge you to register on this website, go to the games section and predict the scores of the remaining matches of Afcon 2012. There’s money to be won and... hey, it’s fun!