LUANDA: Portuguese coach Manuel Jose hopes to transfer his midas touch from club to national team level Sunday when he leads Angola into an African Nations Cup rocked by a terror attack on the Togo bus convoy.
Jose and the Palancas Negras (Black Antelopes) confront Mali at the new 50,000-seat November 11 Stadium here in the opening match of the biennial African football showcase.
The silver-haired 63-year-old who turned Egyptian club Al-Ahly into a continental juggernaut this decade inherited a struggling Angolan squad six months ago in his first national team assignment.
Officials told him to win the Nations Cup, but Jose lowered the bar to a quarter-finals place and being paired with Mali, 2010 World Cup qualifiers Algeria and Malawi in Group A offers a realistic chance of progress.
Mini-league winners and runners-up advance to the last-eight of a tournament won by Egypt in Ghana two years ago and if Angola can secure maximum points against underachieving Mali they will be set fair.
Our goal is to qualify for the quarter-finals. Every team wants to win this tournament and when the Angola Football Federation signed me the idea was to lift the Cup, recalled Jose.
But Angolans cannot raise expectations so high so soon – we must advance step by step. We are ready to look our opponents in the eye and play good football. After that, who knows?
I missed club football at first and for a few months it was tough. Then I settled and am going into this tournament positively. It is a good challenge for my career and I am very motivated.
Tradition favors Angola with 17 of 27 opening matches won by the country staging the tournament and five drawn. The last hosts not to succeed were the Malians, who could only draw with Liberia in Bamako eight years ago.
Although Angola have struggled for goals in warm-up matches that delivered two victories, seven draws and one loss, Jose heaped praise on his strike force ahead of the 32-match tournament in Luanda, Benguela, Cabinda and Lubango.
We have worked hard to become more attack conscious and improve our finishing. I have good strikers in Flavio , Mantorras , Love and Ze Kalanga , he said.
Mali boast a potent midfield with captain Mahamadou Diarra of Real Madrid, Seydou Keita of Barcelona and Mohamed Sissoko of Juventus while strike Frederic Kanoute of Sevilla was voted 2007 African Footballer of the Year.
You need only look at the caliber of players in this team, the body language, attitude and spirit to know we mean business, was the warning to Angola from Mali coach Stephen Keshi. -AFP
