BY FORTUNE MBELE
THE Warriors will not have it easy in tonight’s 2022 Africa Cup of Nations’ (Afcon) finals draw for the showcase to be held next January and February in Cameroon.
For the draw, the 24 teams that qualified for the finals have been placed in four groups according to the August 12 2021 Fifa rankings in a descending order, which has not favoured the Warriors for tonight’s draw.
The six groups will be established tonight when the Warriors will get to know their opponents.
Hosts Cameroon, title holders Algeria in Pot 1, Senegal, Tunisia, Morocco and Nigeria are the top seeds and the Warriors will draw one of them.
The Warriors played against Algeria in the qualifiers where they lost away and forced a draw at the National Sports Stadium.
They also played Algeria at the 2017 Afcon finals in Gabon where the two shared spoils.
Zimbabwe feel they may have a better chance against Algeria compared with the other top seeds.
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Algeria narrowly beat Senegal 1-0 in the finals in 2019 in Cairo, Egypt where the Warriors had a disastrous showing, getting bundled out in the group stages where they were drawn against the hosts the Pharaohs, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.
Pot 2 is also a headache for any coach with giants Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea in it.
The Warriors will probably pray that they get either Burkina Faso or Guinea from Pot 2.
Their weakest opponents will come from Pot 4, which has the lowly-ranked qualifying teams in Malawi, Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, Comoros, Ethiopia, Gambia.
In Pot 3, Zimbabwe are with Cape Verde, Gabon, Mauritania, Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau.
Zimbabwe cannot be placed in the same group as the teams that they are with in the same pot.
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