THE Super Eagles of Nigeria will again square up to the Bafana Bafana for a place in the 2019 African Cup of Nations to be held in Cameroon.<\/p>\n
According to the draw conducted at Radisson Biu, in Libreville, Gabon on Thursday, Nigeria were pooled in Group E of the 2019 qualifiers together with South Africa, Libya and Seychelles.<\/p>\n
Winners of the 12 groups, together with the best three runner-ups will join the host country for the championship proper.<\/p>\n
Recall that Nigeria missed out on the 2015 African Cup of Nations, after the three-time African champions forced the South Africans to a 2-2 draw in Uyo in November 2014.<\/p>\n
The Super Eagles will also be missing out on the 31st edition of Africa\u2019s biggest football spectacle which gets underway in Gabon tomorrow.<\/p>\n
Incidentally Nigeria\u2019s last appearance in the biennial championship was in South Africa four years ago, where the late Stephen Keshi guided his side to the title to become the second person in history to win the diadem both as a player and coach.<\/p>\n
Sao Tom\u00e9, Madagascar, Comoros, Mauritius, Djibouti and South Sudan will have to take part in the preliminaries between March 20 and 28 from which three nations will advance to the group stage.<\/p>\n
The Match Day 1 of the group qualifiers will be held between June 5 and 13 2017, while the last round of qualifiers will be played between November 5 and 13, 2018<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Nigeria have moved a spot up and are now 50th in the world as Argentina retain their number one spot, according to the latest FIFA rankings released on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The rating thus saw Nigeria as Africa\u2019s\u00a0 seventh, with Senegal first in Africa but 33rd in the world.<\/p>\n
Nigeria ended 2016 as number 51 but may see their rating plummeting next month due to failure to participate in the 2017 Africa Nations Cup which starts this weekend in Gabon.<\/p>\n
Nigeria World Cup rivals Algeria are 39th in the world and fifth in Africa, Cameroon are 62nd in the world and 12th in Africa, while Zambia are 88th in the world and 21st in Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
THE Super Eagles of Nigeria will again square up to the Bafana Bafana for a place in the 2019 African Cup of Nations to be held in Cameroon. According to the draw conducted at Radisson Biu, in Libreville, Gabon on Thursday, Nigeria were pooled in Group E of the 2019 qualifiers together with South Africa, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8152,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3,84],"tags":[249,81,248,251,250,194],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/sportingtribune.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/eagle-super-sand-nigeria-beach-team.jpg?fit=620%2C430&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd18y-2l9","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportingtribune.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8999"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportingtribune.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportingtribune.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportingtribune.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportingtribune.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sportingtribune.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportingtribune.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportingtribune.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportingtribune.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportingtribune.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}