The Euro 2016 kickoff

Simmering excitement is about to hit the ceiling as a historic twenty-four European national football teams descended on France for the Euro 2016 later yesterday. A testament to the transcendent and irrepressible force and the world that is football, Kenyan football fans will join the expected 150m other global viewers of the beautiful game. Never mind the fact that Copa América Centenario is currently underway in the USA. Noteworthy, this is a centenary celebration of the first Copa America held in 1916, hence the "merger" with CONCACAF, a big deal in its own rights.

The kickoff saw one of the tournament favorites, France faceoff with Romania at the Stade de France stadium, 10:00 pm local time. The last time France hosted such a huge tournament was the World Cup 2008 that their legendary team went on to win outclassing off perennial fan favorites, Brazil 3-0 in spite of a Marcel Desailly red card in the 68th minute. I digress; the Les Bleus kicked off the tournament at the same stadium that was bombed by suspected ISIS terrorists November last year during a buildup friendly match against Germany. 129 lives were lost that night. Football’s resilience and valor will be on display along with the magical tekkers from some of Europe’s top talent, nightmares of the unfortunate tragedy are put to rest.

Across Europe’s top teams, a lot of the usual squad selection hoo-ha raged. England’s Roy Hodgson received unsolicited advice to ignore Jack Wilshere as he had missed practically the whole Premier league season through injury and had only started one match against Manchester city for his Arsenal team. Danny Drinkwater meanwhile newly crowned champion with Leicester City and Mark Noble had been impressive throughout the season. He also controversially decided to take on board Manchester United’s 18-year-old revelation, Marcus Rashford, who only made his first team debut this February due to injuries to many first team players.

Germany has a couple of big-name players missing albeit due to injury Marco Reus, Manchester City’s Ilkay Gundogan, and Antonio Rudiger. French manager, himself captain of the world Cup winning outfit in ’98, faced serious scrutiny his Les Bleus when he decided to leave out Karim Benzema. A number of former players have criticized the move, others going as far as imputing racism as the driving factor for the decision, never mind that the composition of the team looks to sag towards players of African origin. Less controversial but has been roped it perhaps to offer legitimacy to the claims is Hatem Ben Arfa. He had a fantastic season for his Ligue 1 outfit OG Nice after a forgetful experiment in the English premier league.

When eric Cantona made startling claims that Karim Benzema could have been omitted due to racist tendencies by Didier Deschamps, he might have done well to glance at the squad list first as literally half of the 23 man team, 12 players are of African heritage. Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and successor as ultra-national right-wing Front National party leader also waded into this controversy stating “Karim should go and play for Algeria”.

Karim Benzema, for the record, is a very good forward and comes off the back of a great season for Real Madrid, scoring 24 league goals. He was suspended by the French Football Federation (FFF) in December after being linked to international team-mate Mathieu Valbuena’s sex-tape blackmail saga. This situation reached a ridiculous peak when Olivier Giroud, was charged with leading French attack in Benzema’s absence was booed off the team bus and on the pitch in the match against Cameroon. Giroud obviously came off a frustrating season for his Arsenal Club that saw him go 15 matches on the trot without a goal. He nevertheless scored three goals in against Cameroon and Scotland!

Lost through this polemic, though, is the general fact that the France National team enjoys a huge support base in Africa particularly due to its racial composition. Fans in Africa find it easy to identify with some of its most illustrious names, many of whom can trace their parentage right down to specific countries, Zinedine Zidane, Karim Benzema (Algeria), Ben Arfa (Tunisia) Paul Pogba, Patrick Vieira, Bacary Sagna, etc. Are some of the great past and present names. They have indeed come a long way since Raoul Diagne was capped as the first black player for France on February 15, 1931.

France started off well with a 2-1 win over Romania.