Fever pitch in the tropics

Cynical magicians might have looked at Ivory Coast’s 2-1 victory over Nigeria in the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) football final and gone “big rabbit, small hat”.

Given the simmering chaos of Ivorian football, that the Elephants, even on home ground, made it to the final was the kind of thing that upsets pundits.

Having lost their heads during the 0-4 drubfest against Equatorial Guinea, the experts reckoned the team was finished.

Unhappy Elephants fans took to the streets and burned cars. Shops were looted. Armed guards were posted outside the home of Yacine Idriss Diallo, head of the Ivorian Football Federation — nothing new, of course, to South African fans who are used to seeing armed guards outside the mansions of big shots. Still, the optics, as they say in US politics, were not good.

Diallo had hardly polished his marble during the tournament. First he fired coach Jean-Louis Gasset, and then immediately attempted to poach erstwhile coach Hervé Renard back from France where he manages the national women’s team.

Hiring the relatively little-known home-grown coach, former midfielder Emerson Faé, to step into Gasset’s barely scuffed boots seemed like the prelude to an own goal.

Yet Faé clearly has the magic touch, helped a little by the Elephants sneaking in the back door to a place in the final against the Super Eagles.

And then, and then ... add 60,000 roaring, singing, chanting, vuvuzela-blowing fans, a sea of orange spread over the stands at Alassane Ouattara Stadium under a velvet Ivorian night sky ... and one player, Sébastien Haller, just back from four rounds of chemo for testicular cancer, flicking the ball into the net in the 82nd minute.

The home crowd carried it like they did at Ellis Park in 1995. A country united, a civil war forgotten, $1bn well spent.

Huge rabbit. Tiny hat.