The Elephants have gone home.
Cote d’Ivoire won its third game at the World Cup last week, beating Serbia and Montenegro 3-2 — but its earlier losses, to Argentina and the Netherlands, sent the pachyderms packing.
Inza Coulibaly, the Ivorian expat whom Tempo followed during the tournament, watched the victory alone in his Rogers Park apartment.
“I couldn’t show my face” at the soccer-crazed Globe Pub in Lake View, he said. “But I was on the phone with a friend of mine venting my frustrations.”
Among them: “With the talent we have … Argentina was a tall order, but Holland, I think we should have at least had a draw.”
It also steamed him that the debutante Elephants hadn’t proved anything to Senegal and Cameroon, who have qualified to numerous World Cups (but failed to do so this year).
“In the back of their mind, they think that we weren’t good enough to go,” said Coulibaly, a taxi driver. “A friend of mine from Cameroon called me after we lost to [Netherlands], and he’s saying, `I told you so! I told you so!’ And I didn’t have much ammunition to argue with him.”
For the remainder of the World Cup, he plans to root for Ghana — with mixed emotions. “We have to stand together,” he said. “But I’ll always be thinking it should have been Ivory Coast.”