Sports Illustrated

Thoughts on the winners from the African Cup of Nations quarterfinals:

1. Ivory Coast (beat Equatorial Guinea 3-0). Ivory Coast, meanwhile, continues a progress that has come to seem inexorable. Repeated failures in previous tournaments have spread a mood of caution. This is a generation that has been too good for too long not to succeed, and it has cut all fripperies, any slackness, from its play. The result has been four clean sheets, the most recent of them coming in Saturday's comfortable win over the co-hosts Equatorial Guinea.

It was a performance that yielded just one chance for Equatorial Guinea, and that a snatched, half-hit volley from Randy that really only looked threatening because of Boubacar Barry's cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof style of...

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