Amarylla blog

No men in our team, insist E.Guinea's women

MALABO (AFP) – Equatorial Guinea's football federation hit out on Tuesday at what it called an international defamation campaign after fresh claims that two members of its women's national team were men.

After the tiny central African nation qualified for next year's women's World Cup finals in Germany, stories which first aired several years ago that some of the players were not what they seemed were resurrected by a number of newspapers.

But in a statement, the federation insisted that "the information about the presence of two men in the (women's team) is totally without foundation."

The federation said the accusations swirling around Genoveva Agnonman and Salimata Simpaore stemmed from "an inferiority complex" among rivals after their defeats to Equatorial Guinea in recent pan-continental tournaments.

"The Nigerian press started this and it was followed by the media in Cameroon," the federation's spokesman David Monsuy told AFP.

Equatorial Guinea clinched qualification for the World Cup finals after reaching the final of the women's African Cup of Nations (CAN) that took place in South Africa earlier this month. Nigeria won the final 4-2.

They had won the previous CAN when they hosted the tournament in 2008.