It is quite amazing what tournament finals football can do to the psyche. Senegal qualified for the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations at a virtual canter in a very difficult pool that included Cameroon and DR Congo.

For that reason they were expected pretty much to coast through their pool, which also includes Zambia and Libya, and be among the contenders come the latter stages of the tournament.

Their failure will be one of the talking points of this tournament as their perceived great strength turned into their Achilles heel.

No team could boast a better array of attacking talent that the Teranga Lions in this competition, with the Newcastle United duo of Demba Ba and Pappis Cisse, Lille's Moussa Sow, veteran forward Mamadou Niang, and top midfield talents Issiar Dia from Fenerbahce and Dame N'Doye of FC Copenhagen.

And throughout the 180 minutes they have played in this tournament so far, they have created enough chances to have won five games.

But at the critical moment this attacking talent froze: they suddenly could not finish. Ba has scored 15 goals in the English Premiership this season, but he looked as though he could not hit the proverbial barn door in Bata.

He was not alone, of course, but will probably be the one to carry the can during the post-mortem that will follow.

The good news for Ba and company is that they will not have to wait long to make amends for their failure, with the next Nations Cup tournament just 12 months away in South Africa... assuming they qualify.

There they will have to take what they have learned from this experience to the more comfortable surrounds of South Africa, where the facilities are world-class and the pitches like billiard tables.

For now Senegal must take the pain and disappointment, and use it as motivation to go one better than their 2002 showing, when they finished runners-up in Mali.

Equatorial Guinea will be in dreamland this morning, a place in the quarter-finals at their first-ever continental showpiece tournament.

Given that coach Gilson Paulo joined the side less than three weeks before the start of the tournament, it is an amazing achievement.

Their target now will be to win the pool and avoid a possible meeting with Cote d'Ivoire in the quarter-finals, hoping to defeat whoever else qualifies from Group B -- Angola, Burkina Faso or Sudan.

Right now, any of those teams look beatable for Nzalang Nacional, whose confidence, and bank balance, continues to grow.