Guinea to keep timetable for AFCON 2025 football tournament

Guinea was originally scheduled to host the continental tournament in 2023 but the list of host nations was reshuffled in 2018.

Supporters of Guinea national football team cheer in Sekondi, Ghana, January 28, 2008 during the African Cup of Nations football match against Namibia

Guinea’s military government has told a Confederation of African Football (CAF) mission that it will meet the timetable for staging the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (CAN).

CAF has sent a team to the West African state to assess its readiness to host the tournament.

Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, who appointed himself president after taking power in a coup in September 2021, met the delegation on Wednesday.

“They came with a message, and this message was, ‘Is 2025 feasible for us [Guineans] or not?’,” Sports Minister Lansana Bea Diallo said.

The CAF team held out the possibility of postponing CAN 2025 until 2026 or 2027, he said.

“The president was straightforward – ‘We made this a national priority, and the national priority is for 2025, we won’t go for 2026 or 2027, we will organise it in 2025’,” the minister was quoted on state TV late Wednesday as saying.

“And that’s the word of the head of state which has been given today,” he said.

Hosting Africa’s biggest sporting event is a major challenge for Guinea, which suffers a chronic lack of sporting and transport infrastructure.

The country also has a long history of political turbulence.

Last year’s coup saw the removal of octogenarian President Alpha Conde after bloody protests over his bid for a third term in office.

The takeover has stirred frictions with the influential West African bloc ECOWAS, which has been pushing for an early return to civilian rule.

On the eve of the CAF visit, Doumbouya issued a decree declaring the 2025 competition an issue of “national and priority interest”.

All spending for organisational needs “will be processed as a matter of urgency” and procedures will be fast-tracked to allocate land needed for the tournament.

In March, Doumbouya named a new organising committee after one of its members publicly doubted whether it was feasible to host the tournament in 2025.

The CAF mission appeared to have been encouraged by the visit.

“Today we are really reassured by Guinea’s preparedness,” said one of its members, Benin’s Mathurin de Chacus.

Doumbouya “spoke like a soldier – he’s determined to organise CAN for the Guinean public”, he said in remarks broadcast on television.

The delegation will brief CAF on the outcome of its mission, he said.

Guinea was originally scheduled to host the tournament in 2023, but this was pushed back by two years when the list of organising nations was reshuffled in 2018.

The 2023 event will be hosted by Ivory Coas

 

Nearly entire train network shuts down in Netherlands over strike

Staff at the railway firm NS stop work in the central Netherlands region that acts as a hub for nearly all train lines.

A stranded traveller passes a sculpture of a blue train at Utrecht Centraal station 

Nearly the entire Dutch rail network has been shut down as workers affected by soaring inflation and staff shortages are on strike to demand better pay and working conditions.

Staff at the railway company Nederlandes Spoorwegen (NS) stopped work for the day on Tuesday in the central Netherlands region that acts as a hub for nearly all train lines, halting trains across the country.

An exception was the line linking Amsterdam with the busy Schiphol airport that returned to service after a strike shut it down on Monday.

Utrecht Centraal station, the country’s biggest rail hub and normally packed with travellers, was eerily deserted on Tuesday morning.

Screens showing train timetables were lit up with the word “cancelled” in red letters and a station announcer explained in Dutch and English that services were being hit by the strike.

NS said in a statement that international trains operated by Thalys and Eurostar were running again after being halted on Monday.

Schiphol said in a warning to travellers that NS had indicated that four trains an hour would run each way between the airport and the Dutch capital’s central station.

Labour unions have called a series of strikes on the Dutch rail network after negotiations on a new collective labour agreement broke down.

All trains listed were marked “cancelled” in red at Utrecht Centraal station