Togo will play!!


sos

   

Togo's government sent a plane Sunday to Angola to bring home its national football team from the violence-marred Africa Cup of Nations after an attack left at least two dead and nine others injured, said Prime Minister Gilbert Houngbo

Separatists, terrorists or whatever you call them the FLEC-R attacks will not end. They are going to use the ACON tournament as a world stage for their platform. Hence there will be further attempts hopefully not at the Chinese built stadiums in Cabinda.
This is a dilemma for the players. No amount of security is going to prevent the FLEC-R suicidal groups from attacking again.
The Togo bus was heavily protected but still came under fire.
To call of the ACON matches in Cabinda might be wise because of the unresolved  legacy of the Angola Civil War
Not the WC in South Africa as a number of Cassandras, nattering nabobs of negativism/negativity, will be clamouring for.
I don't feel good about this. Thats why I hope the FA will act on to recall all BPL players.
I know Ade is going home. I hope the others will !

the Premier League managers are divided over whether their players at the Africa Cup of Nations should return to the UK after the Togo team bus attack. Hull boss Phil Brown told The Sun: "I have two players on duty [in Angola] and I want them home."
Portsmouth said their players should return if security at the tournament could not be guaranteed.
But Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger and Everton's David Moyes both said the attack should not halt the competition.
Wenger, who has Ivory Coast's Emanuel Eboue and Cameroon's Alex Song on international duty in Angola, said the tournament should go on. "I don't believe you just can stop a competition as it rewards the people who provoke the incident and means any competition is stoppable at any time," he said.
"The international federation has to make sure the security is good enough."

Accommodation and transport are extremely limited outside of Luanda,’ say the Foreign Office. And here is their considered opinion of Cabinda, an enclave and province of Angola, separated from the rest of the country by land belonging to the Democratic Republic of Congo.‘We advise against all but essential travel to the interior of Cabinda Province. In 2008 there were reports of violent incidents including rape, murder and kidnapping involving foreigners and Angolans in the Province. Groups claiming responsibility for these attacks have declared their intention to continue attacks against foreigners.’
Cabinda is a disputed territory and armed groups seek its independence. As its coastline contains some of Angola’s richest and most
developed oilfields, there is great reluctance to allow this to happen. What better place, then, to hold five Group B games, a single Group A game and a quarter-final during the Africa Cup of Nations?
It is not as if some of the most famous sportsmen in the world might not be a target for armed freedom fighters wishing to draw attention to their cause.
The Cabinda bowl would certainly seem the one to avoid at the draw on November 20. Now that is what you call a group of death.
That opinion was published in this newspaper on August 19, 2009. It did not require a two-month fact-finding mission or a Deep Throat-style meeting with a CIA mole in an underground car park to research, merely a passable knowledge of recent history and a laptop digging would have done it. Yet the outrageously glib first reaction of the Confederation of African Football to a wholly avoidable tragedy, for which they are culpable, was to question why the Togo team travelled to Cabinda by road, rather than air.
‘Most internal travel continues to be by air,’ the Foreign Office says of Angola, ‘though the quality and maintenance of aircraft operated by some airlines within Angola cannot be relied upon. It is recommended that you avoid flying with any Angolan-operated airline if an acceptable alternative means of travel exists.’ Also, Togo had prepared for this tournament at a camp 125 miles from Cabinda, so flying to their destination would have necessitated a return trip to Luanda, capital of Angola, and a second flight back over the territory they had left
They probably couldn’t afford it and it is appalling that the organisers should admonish them for the tragic consequences of this decision. Neither does Danny Jordaan, chief executive of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, have the right to mount his knackered old high horse again at comparisons drawn between events in Angola and security at his tournament in the summer
He is correct that the two bear no comparison because South Africa does not have a terrorism problem — it has a crime problem — but Jordaan was among those who visited Angola on behalf of the CAF in 2006 and pronounced it suitable, with special reference to security.
That is what these guys do. They travel the world blithely announcing that everything is coming up roses, usually from a suite at the only five-star hotel in town. They are then picked up from the door, and delivered to another one at the airport, before departing, first class.
The Africa Cup of Nations in Angola was flawed from the start because, financially, it had to include games in oil-rich Cabinda, which is a disputed region at the mercy of terrorists. And this is not being wise after the event: it was there for all to see. The bottom line is that the Angolan government wished to use this opportunity to demonstrate Cabinda was safe for foreign investors, which it is not, and so the entire tournament was built on a falsehood propelled by avarice. There is even a clampdown on media reports of insurgency in the area to encourage investment by major companies such as Chevron. You can dismount now, Danny. Thanks.
As can all the armchair generals, reporting live from the fireside, who continue to advocate it is the duty of young sportsmen to fight by proxy wars that they do not understand, as if the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda were going to put down their weapons and declare it a lost cause if Togo had defied their government and kicked off against Ghana at the Estadio Chimandela this afternoon.
FLEC have already achieved their aim because now everybody is aware of the bloody dispute in Cabinda and Angolan government
interests have been harmed. They may even consider the job done and the remainder of the tournament will pass off without incident. Even so, to guarantee team safety, as some Angolan ministers have done, is deceitful. No government can do that. Not in South Africa, not in London in 2012, not in Brazil in 2014 and certainly not in Angola.
Fatally, modern sports administration exists in a world of let’s pretend. Let’s pretend the world is one, let’s pretend all countries are
equally challenged, let’s pretend all have the same resources and ability to cope.
If Angola, still in recovery from 27 years of brutal civil war, has the infrastructure to deal with a major international tournament, as Jordaan and others suggested, why was it necessary to airlift Kodjovi Obilale, the goalkeeper of Togo, who was shot twice in the back during the Cabinda attack, to the Millpark Hospital in Johannesburg, 1,780 miles away? A colleague died of his wounds during the journey.
This self-serving deception must stop. And it would, immediately, if we could only force a rule change that by law imposed compulsory travel by public transport and a limit of £100 per night on accommodation for all administrators, organisers and executives at sports events. Then we would see how many would be prepared to run the Cabinda gauntlet.

this is serious matter, FIFA should consider event suspension