En in de kwartfinales slechts 2 niet-Noord-Afrikaanse ploegen (TP Mazembe en Sundowns). Hegemonie van de noordelijke landen dus.
Tout Puissant. Daar schreef ik eens dit over:
The inscrutably and intriguingly named Tout Puissant Mazembe ply their footballing trade in Kamalondo, a suburb from Lubumbashi in the more or less Democratic Republic of Congo.
They were founded in 1939 as Saint Georges, by devote Benedictine monks from the Sanctimonious Saint Order, dedicated to provide leisure time for boy scouts, at a time Lubumbashi was known as Elisabethville under Belgian colonial submission.
In 1944, the young footballing scouts went on the road and Saint Georges FC were rechristened Saint Paul FC, the indefatigable apostle of the Gentiles, for inexplicable reasons.
With the gradually increasing influence and incorporation of insubordinating non-papal and foreign elements, the venerable monks parted from the team management. Subsequently, the club were baptised Englebert FC to please their Belgian sugar daddy, a tire manufacturing firm and successfull supplier of Formula I racing gear in the Fifties.
The club earned the qualifier and prefix Tout Puissant, ‘The Almighty', to immortalize the memorable feat of finishing first and undefeated during their 1965/66 campaign.
Their badge is an intriguing affair with the absence of a monestary, Belgian royalty, boy scouts, saints, tyres and ravens. What motivated powers to go down the bellicose warpath of a ‘catchment area in force’; as if polarising from and failing to contain the essence and nature of the club’s history, denying philosophical conditions of reference and ‘'hereditary' association.
So how is the crocodile in the emblem accounted for, giving rise to Tout Puiissant’s alternative nickname?
In local Nguena parlance the depicted crocodile is a reference to DR Congo’s naval forces. The domestic land forces are symbolically represented by bulldozers cq caterpillars. There’s the suffix ‘Mazembe’ for you.
Tout Puissant Mazembe go by the sobriquet of Les Corbeaux, which is French shorthand for The Ravens. The local air forces are epitomised by ‘Les Corbeaux’. Unfortunately, their wings were cut in the process of designing the badge of the century...
Tout Puissant Mazembe. A tour de force.