Song is playing his final tune

Rigobert Song was at fault for Zambia's first goal in his Cameroon's 3-2 win on Sunday.

Rigobert Song has always given headline writers plenty to work with. For a start, the Cameroon defender holds remarkable records (sic): The youngest footballer to have received a red card at a World Cup finals, at just 17. The curiosity of having been sent off at two separate World Cups. The fact that nobody has competed in as many African Cups of Nations as he. Song will hope only that this, his record eighth such tournament, will today extend into a second round.

Having lost one match and just scrapped three points in the other so far, Cameroon need a good performance against Tunisia to ensure progress. Besides the milestones and the incidents, Song also has a good name for writers of headlines, at least those working in English. The Cameroon captain has been "on song" in newspapers more times than he would remember and the musical puns were frequent when he was playing in the English Premier League with Liverpool and West Ham United, and there were days when his performance were rightly described as "off key", or "out of tune".

For the past week in Angola, the same note - if readers will excuse the phrase - has recurred at the 27th African Cup of Nations. Cameroon supporters are beginning to hope this tournament is Song's international swansong, fearful that his 33-year-old legs and battered body might be a liability come June's World Cup finals in South Africa. With his trademark dreadlocks, all-action style and noisy leadership skills, Song was for many years a formidable obstacle to some of the best strikers in the world.

He helped guide Cameroon to successive Nations Cup triumph in 2000 and 2002, and his club career has adapted itself and usually thrived in leagues as different as the French, the German, the Italian, the German and the Turkish, where he now plays for Trabzonspor. But the evidence lately is that the errors are proving too expensive and frequent for experience and gusto to compensate. Song's carelessness in Cameroon's second match of the Nations Cup against Zambia cost a goal and recalled the mistake he made in the final of the competition two years ago that led to a 1-0 defeat against Egypt.

Last week's error looked expensive at the time. Cameroon went behind against the Zambians, and having lost their opening fixture to Gabon, might have been eliminated but for a late recovery to win 3-2. The faults are not only with Song, the veteran. The side now coached by Frenchmen Paul Le Guen had started the Nations Cup in Angola among the favourites to win it. But in Lubango, their base in Angola, they have looked slovenly and awkward.

Le Guen notes that Cameroon in recent tournaments and qualifying groups have been sluggish out of the blocks and then grown stronger; he forgets that at the tournament that first put Cameroon on the global football map they did quite the opposite, and produced the most startling first night at any World Cup, perhaps ever. That was at Italia 90, when the then unknowns from Africa beat the reigning world champions, Argentina 1-0. Buoyed from there by a 38-year-old supersub named Roger Milla, Cameroon went on to within minutes of a place in the semi-final.

"This is how football can make a small country big," Milla said at the time. Cameroon have had an aura about them ever since. No African country has reached as many World Cup finals, and no African team have surpassed the Indomitable Lions' achievement of reaching the last eight at a World Cup. And yet there remains a frustration that for all the brilliance of Samuel Eto'o, their great striker, and the endurance of Song, modern Cameroon teams have never quite had the exuberance of Milla's 1990 warriors.

"Other teams in Africa have caught up and developed their football better than us," said Joseph Antoine Bell, the Lions' goalkeeper in the 1980s and 1990s. "The players who get picked and transferred to Europe are not necessarily the great African creators. "There used to be a style that Cameroonian football had, and it was the style of the street. Everybody played in the streets. These boys got together and between them, they created the ways to succeed.

"Now I worry Cameroon football may be characterised not by a style, but by its absence of style." @Email:[e-mail] Cameroon v Tunisia, KO 8pm, Aljazeera Sport + 9 & +10