Senegal – Botswana. Forecast and announcement for the African Cup of Nations match

On December 23, the match of the 1st round of the group stage of the Africa Cup of Nations will be held at Stade Ibn Batuta, in which the national teams of Senegal and Botswana will play. The match will start at 17:00 Kyiv time.

Senegal

The team is considered one of the strongest at least on the continent. And in general, she confirmed her status during the last qualification. There was unexpectedly quite a good opponent in the person of the DR Congo. But when you don’t lose and rarely lose points, you can beat such a competitor. In the end, with seven wins and three draws, the favorite managed to take first place – just the intrigue lasted until the last. Moreover, at the same time, they came third at the African Nations Championship, and in the semi-finals they lost to Morocco only on penalty kicks.

Only after that, in November, Mane and the company still lost – but only in a friendly match, and against the star Brazilians. But even after that, the Kenyans lost their souls – they scored eight unanswered goals in the next test match. Of course, it will be extremely difficult to repeat this, and in official matches.

Botswana

The national team can be considered an outsider at the continental level. It was only the second time in its history that she made it to Cannes at all – before that there was only a debut at the tournament in 2012, with three defeats.

Nothing has changed recently – it is true, they managed to make it to the African Cup. But there was another failure in the selection for the World Cup. In ten matches there were only three victories and ten points – only the clear outsider, Sudan, showed itself worse there. And even before the start of the tournament, already in December, they conceded 1:2 in a control match, even against a strong representative of the north of the continent – Tunisia.

Statistics of personal meetings

The national team played in 2014, also as part of the African Nations Cup. And both times the Senegalese won with a total score of 5:0.

Forecast

Bookmakers do not expect intrigue from this couple. Mane and company are stronger than this opponent by a head – we bet that they will start the tournament with a handicap of -1.5 goals (coefficient – 1.73).