Sadio Mane was abruptly reminded last week that time waits for nobody in his line of work. His club Liverpool, where he is held in huge affection by his manager, Jurgen Klopp, his teammates and supporters, announced an outstanding new recruit, Luis Diaz, at the end of the transfer window who fits, quite precisely, into Mane’s position.
Diaz, the Colombia international, could cost Liverpool €60 million if he achieves the add-ons in the deal agreed with Porto for his move to Anfield - not the sort of fee Mane’s club invest in a back-up player. Diaz’s most effective role, like Mane’s, is to the left of an attacking trident. Like Mane, he has an excellent goalscoring record from there: 14 in the top flight of Portuguese football from 18 games this season.
Diaz is 25; in April Mane will be 30 and is wise enough to know that the club he has spearheaded through a period of generation-defining success have been planning for a future beyond him and his fabulously productive partnership with Mohamed Salah. Both players’ Liverpool contracts expire next year. Liverpool want them to renew, but are arming themselves for a longer term in which they no longer have a pair of African Footballers of the Year as their attacking emblems.
There’s a limited timeline for Mane with his national team, too, and an impatience, ahead of Wednesday’s Africa Cup of Nations semi-final against Burkina Faso for the coronation that has stubbornly avoided Senegal.
For much of the 21st century, Senegal’s Lions have led the way in African football without ever being champions of the continent. In 2002, when Mane was a rural schoolboy dreaming of a life in football, his compatriots reached their first Africa Cup of Nations final, defeated by Cameroon. Four months later, they raised the curtain on a sensational World Cup in South Korea, beating the title-holders, France, in the opening match of the tournament and advancing, at the country’s first appearance at a World Cup, to the quarter-finals - as far as any nation from Africa has progressed at the game’s major showpiece.
The appointment in Yaounde with Burkina Faso, one-time runners-up at an Afcon, is Senegal’s sixth semi-final in the competition. The yield of medals is a meagre pair of silvers, 20 years ago and in 2019, when Mane was among those defeated in the final by Algeria.
Mane - who has played in a winning and a losing European Cup final; and finished a Premier League season in second place with a massive 97 points before claiming the title a year later - has had enough of the near-misses. “We are here to win this Cup,” he said after the 3-1 quarter-final win over Equatorial Guinea, “not just to make it to the final. If we only did that we’d be so disappointed.”
Ranked first in Africa according to Fifa, Senegal came to Cameroon with the tag of Afcon favourites, though various factors seemed to discount that status. Key performers, like defender and captain Kalidou Koulibaly, of Napoli, and the Watford winger Ismaila Sarr, arrived carrying injuries. There was a bout of positive Covid tests, including one that ruled goalkeeper Edouard Mendy, of Chelsea, out of the opening pair of group games.
Senegal v Equatorial Guinea ratings
Their football seemed crabby, sluggish. By half time of their last-16 tie against Cape Verde, their only tournament goal had been Mane’s late penalty in the first group game against Zimbabwe. They sealed their place in the last eight only once Cape Verde had had two players sent off, Mane breaking the deadlock in a 2-0 victory.
But last Sunday, a sublime pass from Mane to Famara Diedhiou unlocked a stylish Equatorial Guinea in a quarter-final that showed the best of Senegal, foregrounding Mane’s panache and the strength in depth that head coach, Aliou Cisse, can call on and understands how to use. Chiekhou Kouyate came off the bench, immediately alert to a defensive error that allowed him to hook in Senegal’s second goal. Ismaila Sarr, out of competitive action since November, celebrated his comeback with a goal barely 20 minutes after Cisse had introduced him as a substitute.
The head coach, concerned at the outset of the tournament about the fitness of trusted players, was applauded for his substitutions and for the way he has paced the campaign, gradually, patiently.
But Cisse is as impatient as any Senegalese to claim that elusive first Afcon. He was a player in the 2002 team, was the Senegal coach who missed out on a World Cup knockout round via the narrowest of tie-breakers - the number of group-stage yellow cards - in 2018, and who guided his country to second place at the last Nations Cup. “We’re gaining in strength,” warned Cisse, another final now in his sights.
