Moroccan football stands today just shy of the summit it has yearned so long for. Second place in Africa, runners-up in a Cup of Nations, is no great failure in the wider context of where the Atlas Lions have been for half a century.
But the overwhelming sensation from their tempestuous, controversial, bitter 1-0 defeat to Senegal in the Afcon final is of deep disappointment.
“The chance of a lifetime,” Walid Regragui, the coach who has driven Morocco’s men’s team to some unprecedented heights, called the extra-time loss in the final.
It is coming close to a lifetime now since Morocco won their last and only Africa Cup of Nations title. That was in 1976. While it is scarcely possible to imagine that a country so capable, so ambitious for its football and so galvanised will wait another 50 years before ending the Afcon drought, the silver medals handed to their players late on Sunday came embossed with deep regret.
Resentment too, because for all the flattery rained on Morocco over the past month, for its largely impressive organisation of the 35th Afcon – an awkward beast of a tournament squeezed into the middle of most domestic seasons,
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