The Elephants are ready to stampede

Here is a quiz question: Go back to the semi-finals of the last European Champions League and name the three clubs whose academies - youth systems - were best represented among the four first-team squads involved. The first two are easy: Barcelona, the champions, field teams with sometimes six or seven home-grown footballers in them. As for the English sides, well, Manchester United still have the remnants of a great graduate era - Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs - and a clutch of players - Darren Fletcher, John O'Shea - who have passed through their junior classes since. Arsenal and Chelsea tend to import talent, so the third answer is neither of the two clubs who lost those semi-finals. The third answer is a club not in England, nor even in Europe. The full answer is Barcelona, Manchester United and then ? Asec Mimosas, of Ivory Coast.

Four footballers who grew up and were educated at Asec, in Abidjan, were playing for Chelsea, Arsenal and Barcelona last season. Most still are. Other Asec alumni are at Champions League clubs from Sevilla to Stuttgart, or fetching high prices in the Premier league, or starring in leagues across Europe from the French Ligue 1 to the Dutch Eredivisie. And some of them now form the backbone of what is being heralded as the most worldly and perhaps talented national side to emerge from sub-Saharan Africa in the last two decades.

Besides the likes of Yaya and Kolo Toure, Salomon Kalou and Emmanuel Eboue, Ivory Coast have some gifted men who have not been schooled at Asec. Like their captain, Didier Drogba, of Chelsea. Any side that builds itself around the Toure brothers - Kolo in defence, Yaya in midfield - and Drogba up front is a side to fear and last Saturday, Ivory Coast all but secured their ticket to the 2010 World Cup finals, with the second 5-0 win in their final qualifying group, this time over Burkina Faso. This is the Ivorian squad that some great managers dream of taking charge of: Carlo Ancelotti, who at Chelsea is getting the best out of Drogba and admiring the pace and deftness of Kalou, used to wonder out loud, while in his last year at Milan, if he might have a chance of taking Ivory Coast to the World Cup. He said so repeatedly, somewhat to the annoyance of the incumbent head coach of the so-called "Elephants", Vahid Halilhodzic.

Halilhodzic knows he has a hot property. He has also heard the optimism that will serenade the good African squads to South Africa next June, the strange logic that says a World Cup in Africa will be kind to and good for teams from the same continent. That does not follow: Ivory Coast and Ghana, who on Sunday confirmed their presence at the finals, are no closer to Cape Town than Ukraine is to London. But experience and expertise, wherever it is learned or acquired, does count, and the 2010 Ivorians ought to be stronger than the 2006 version, who at their first-ever World Cup finals were unlucky to be drawn in a group with Argentina, Holland and Serbia and still gave a respectable account of themselves.

"You just have to look at the number of Ivorians playing at the top clubs in Europe at the moment and you see that number is growing," Barcelona's Yaya Toure, with his freshly earned Spanish league, European Cup and Copa del Rey medals, says. "It shows we are a force to be reckoned with." His brother, Kolo, adds he sees no reason why Les Elephants, in their bright orange jerseys, cannot break the glass ceiling that seems to suppress Africa's finest at World Cups. No African nation has yet gone beyond a quarter-final. The Ivory Coast of Drogba and the Toures just might.

@Email:ihawkey@thenational.ae