Africa has more to celebrate than to regret about the performance of her players in the 2010 World Cup, says a commentator with 30 years' experience of writing about football and politics in Africa and Latin America.

Judging whether Africa has played disappointingly at the World Cup depends on "how you select your evidence and how good you thought things were going to be," writes John Carlin in South African newspapers on Tuesday.

"The best realistic outcome for Africa in this World Cup was always going to be that one of its teams would make it - for the first time - to the semi-finals.

"This prospect remains entirely realistic today, as there is no reason why Ghana... should not beat Uruguay in the quarters."

Carlin is a longtime foreign correspondent for British and Spanish newspapers who was based in Latin America and South Africa. He has written books on David Beckham and the Real Madrid football team and on Nelson Mandela and the 1995 rugby world cup (which became the basis of the movie "Invictus").

Assessing individual teams, Carlin suggested he did not expect South Africa to perform as well as it did, and that Nigeria was experiencing, "as happens to all nations (say Italy)... their generational ups and downs."

Cote d'Ivoire had bad luck: being drawn in the same group as Brazil and Portugal, and star player Didier Drogba's injury. If the matches against Brazil and Portugal were played again, with Drogba fit, "I'd put money on the Africans picking up at least four points."

Cameroon's performance provided the biggest disappointment - "almost on the scale of the Italian and French ones" - Carlin writes.

But overall, African football is living up to expectations.

"One in six foreign players in Europe today is from Africa, a statistic unthinkable a generation ago..." adds Carlin. "If you'd told me back in 1990 that [Samuel Eto'o]... would achieve what he has achieved in the past couple of years, I'd have struggled to believe you."