Sudan’s participation in the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) is “bringing hope” to the nation’s people amid its civil war, forward Abobaker Eisa says.<\/p>\n
The country has been in the grip of what the United Nations calls the world’s largest humanitarian crisis since April 2023, when a power struggle between the army and a paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Force (RSF), led to conflict.<\/p>\n
More than 150,000 people have been killed and over 12 million forced to flee their homes, with widespread famine and reports of genocide in the western Darfur region.<\/p>\n
The conflict forced Sudan to play all their qualifying matches away from home, but they came through to book their Afcon spot for only the fourth time since 1976.<\/p>\n
The 1970 champions face Algeria (24 December), Equatorial Guinea (28 December), and Burkino Faso (31 December) in the group stage, and Eisa says every match is a “big deal” and a potential distraction for those in Sudan.<\/p>\n
“There’s a lot of bad things going on in Sudan. As players, we know how much of a big deal football can be to our nation,” Eisa told BBC World Service.<\/p>\n
“There’s not a lot of smiles at the minute, so we’re trying to use football as a way to get their minds off [the war].<\/p>\n
“Even qualifying for the Afcon and having fans there to cheer us on \u2013 the fact that we’re there is already bringing hope.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sudan’s participation in the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) is “bringing hope” to the nation’s people amid its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":368834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-368833","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/368834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}