Uganda’s national football team, Cranes, qualified for the finals of the Africa Cup of Nations last Sunday after 38 years on the sidelines.

The Cranes’ campaign for Afcon 2017 came down to the wire with a final group stage game against the Comoros at the Mandela National Stadium in Namboole. Cranes won the game with a solitary goal scored in the 34th minute.

It was the very last game in the group stage and Uganda needed a win to qualify either as group leaders (if Burkina Faso lost to Botswana) or as one of two best-placed runners up – a new window for qualification introduced in 2015 by the executive committee of the Confederation of African Football (CAF).

In the campaign of 2013 too, Cranes had to wait for for the final group game to know their fate. The team needed to beat Zambia, a continental football powerhouse, to qualify. The game stretched into a penalty shootout after extra time, and Uganda lost.

The 2013 squad was considered one of the best in two decades, and they faltered. This time round, all but two of the squad play some sort of professional football, mostly in far flung and non-traditional footballing countries like Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Iraq. The sole goal hero, Miya, recently joined Standard Liège, one of the most successful clubs of the Belgian league.

For the Sunday match, the stadium was packed beyond its 42,000-seat capacity, and among those on the terraces was First Lady Janet Museveni.

The victory could not have come at a better time, hot on the heels of a disastrous Rio 2016 Olympics campaign from the Ugandan contingent of athletes returned empty handed. Stephen Kiprotich, who failed to defend his Olympic marathon title, blamed the Rio failure on poor and late preparations.

Construction of the national high altitude training and sports centre in Kapchorwa, home to nearly all Uganda’s long distance athletes, has repeatedly fallen behind schedule four years after works began on the site in Teryet. 

It is a little surprising then that, according to the Cranes’ coach Milutin Sredojevi, Sunday’s victory resulted from ultra-patriotism, commitment and enthusiasm of players and improvisation of certain individuals.

Uganda’s football governing body, Fufa, owes Sredojevi salary arrears of up to five months, which amount to between $40,000 and $60,000.

The last time Uganda Cranes qualified for the finals of the Africa Cup of Nations was in 1978 when Idi Amin Dada was the country’s president.