CAF World Cup Qualifying: Home Teams Dominate Opening Round

The first set of qualifying matches in the second round of CAF’s qualifying tournament heavily favored home sides on Friday and Saturday. It didn’t hurt that most of the home sides were Africa’s traditional powers, but there was one match in particular where homefield advantage let an inferior team capture a comfortable win.

Ghana posted the biggest result of qualifying so far, hanging an unsurprising 7-0 score on Lesotho. The Black Stars kept all of their experienced strikers off their roster, but didn’t need them. Jordan Ayew and Dominic Adiyah both scored twice.

The business end of World Cup qualifying gets underway in Africa on Friday, which means it’s time to highlight their absolutely awful qualifying system. The remaining teams have been split up into 10 groups of four teams each. The winner of each group will go on to the next round of the competition. This seems simple and reasonable, but because of the way the groups have been drawn, it’s actually awful.

Some continents have a playoff for second placed teams in groups, while some continents have a big final round robin round at the end of qualifying. Both systems make sense, and either would suit Africa. Basically, anything that allows two teams from the same group to qualify after this stage would be cool. The fact that it is impossible for two of the best teams in Africa to qualify is ridiculous. Additionally, Sudan joins them in Group D, and they’re no joke. Zambia goes away to Sudan in a huge match on Saturday.