CAF has selected two former TotalEnergies Africa Cup of Nations winners, Lucas Radebe and Salomon Kalou, to assist with the group stage draw for the TotalEnergies Africa Cup of Nations, Cote d’Ivoire 2023, on Tuesday, April 19, 2022.
CAF’s Communications Department disclosed in a statement that the draw will be conducted live at 17:30 GMT at SuperSport studios in Johannesburg, South Africa, and can also be watched on all CAF platforms. CAF stated that viewers interested in joining the conversation can also do so on #TotalEnergiesAFCON2.
Ex-South African international defender, Radebe, and former Cote d’Ivoire striker, Kalou, will join CAF Director of Competitions, Samson Adamu, for the draw.
The former Bafana Banfana defender and captain, Radebe, was a member of the South African team that won the 1996 TotalEnergies African Cup of Nations. He made four appearances in Africa’s flagship football competition, having played in the tournaments of 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2002. Radebe was also the captain of the South African national football team during both the 1998 FIFA World Cup and the 2002 FIFA World Cup.
On the other hand, Kalou is a former Chelsea player and was a key attacker for the Elephants when they won the AFCON in 2015 in Equatorial Guinea. He scored five goals in six appearances in the tournament as he featured in the 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2017 editions of the continental showpiece event.
Procedure for the draw
In the upcoming draw, forty-eight teams will be drawn into 12 groups of four teams each with the top two teams qualifying for the tournament to be played in the West African country next year.
The qualifiers for the 34th edition of the TotalEnergies Africa Cup of Nations will start in June 2022 and CAF has already released the draw procedure. Based on the FIFA official ranking issued on March 31, 2022, the 48 teams that qualified to participate in the 2nd round of the TotalEnergies AFCON qualifiers have been seeded into 4 levels. The highest ranked teams were placed in Pot 1 which includes teams like Senegal, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Cameroon, Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, DRC, and host, Cote d’Ivoire. The rest were placed in Pots 2, 3, and 4 based on the rankings.
There will be 12 Groups of 4 teams (Group A to L) with the first and the runner up of the 11 groups, where the host is not playing, qualify to the final tournament. Since the host is automatically qualified despite its result, CAF disclosed that if the host is ranked first in the group, it will qualify in addition to the team that will finish second. However, if the host is ranked second, it will qualify in addition to the first of the group. If the host finished third or fourth, it will qualify in addition to the first in the group.
The 33rd Edition of the AFCON held in Cameroon earlier this year, ended in a historic fashion as the Teranga Lions of Senegal clichéd the trophy for the first time, having lost the finals on two previous occasions. Senegal beat 7-time champions, Egypt, 4-2 on penalties at the Olembé stadium in Yaoundé to write its name in the list of countries that have ever won the continental showpiece.
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