As we plod along towards our umpteenth and futile foray into World Cup play, sitting here watching a gradually disappearing bottle of Pauillac, I am reminded of some great moments of football that I know I am very unlikely to re-experience on the Cameroon side of things.Great wine breeds melancholy, doesn’t it?
Whichever way you look at it though, 1990 was a meaningful year, an unforgettable moment actually, even though we know, in retrospect, that we got very lucky then. But who cares really how we got there as long as we chalked up a respectable performance through a combination of nifty ball-playing and a fair measure of « ntong »? Is it not how football games are won and reputations made? Wouldn’t you kill to experience or re-experience the madness and the pride we basked in that year?To strut our legendary smugness one more time on foreign soil?
That, I believe, will not happen again anytime soon. I am a hardened Brazil-skeptic, and if 2010 in South Africa was an embarrassment, I bet this time around will be remembered at best as a humbug.
Granted, there is always a chance in football. Pinning our hopes on luck is certainly no folly in our case, as one single game in Portugal showed how far back we could be on the world stage. The fact that we will be the only nation going to Brazil without a duly elected chief executive officer is another damning factor that shows the sorry state of football governance in our country. Governance has always been a recurrent issue; there is nothing new on this front. But we used to perform reasonably well, regardless. What is newer is that, in the last ten years or so, we have been bad as well on the pitch. The situation on both fronts is not particularly conducive to luck coming our way.
But « le Cameroun, c’est le Cameroun », right? Or « qu’importe le flacon, pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse », n’est-ce pas? Bull. Because we do not play by the rules of Cameroon. We are talking here about a world scene where competence, hard work and accountability are blended together for the pursuit of one single goal, i.e. winning football paramount trophy. For our country, cracking a spot on the 4 to 8 best list in the world would be a tremendous achievement.
So, do we measure up? Can we deliver? Hardly. For a start, we just do not have enough talent on the pitch, and it does not matter whether you take all the Kamenis, the Songs, the Chedjous and all the rest and blend them with other ballplayers made Cameroon nationals by virtue of a hastily-delivered national passport, the line-up you could field against Croatia is still very ordinary indeed. Then there is the Cameroonian scourge: we never learn, we know it all and we never care.
Yes, there is really more than one way to skin a cat. And football is just another human activity. We play it our way, they play it their way. The problem is that they win and we don’t. Their way is arguably the better way. We could learn from the best, even steal from them. But I’d rather bet on the time-honoured quality of Lynch Bages than on the will of all of Cameroon to finally skin our cat the better way.
