Ghana has been designed as one the seven seeded teams for the final stage of the Africa Cup of Nations to be played between January 17 and February 7, 2015 in Morocco.
The decision is one of the resolutions made by the CAF Executive Committee at its meeting in Egypt this week, confirming a story earlier revealed by GHANAsoccernet.com
It also exempted Ghana from the worries of going through a series of complex qualifying stages to reach Africa’s football showpiece.
The race to Morocco will begin in April with Africa’s four least rated teams- Mauritania, Mauritius, Eritrea and South Sudan- bidding to join 26 other nations in the second round.
The second and third stages will further trim the field to seven nations- to join 21 CAF ranked nations-including Ghana, for the group phase that will produce the 15 countries that will join host Morocco for the main tournament.
The group phase matches will be played from September 5 through November 19, 2014 and will see the top two teams in each group, as well as the best third-place team of the seven groups, automatically qualify for Morocco 2015.
Nigeria, the current holders of the Africa Cup of Nations will be joined by Ghana, Ivory Coast, Zambia, Burkina, Mali and Tunisia as the other seeded nations.
CAF factored the teams’ performances in the 2010, 2012, the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations in addition to the 2014 World Cup qualification campaign as the yardstick to determine the seeded teams.
Instructively, Nigeria ticked all the columns, aside from the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations in Gabon/ Equatorial Guinea which it failed to reach.
The draw for the knock-out stages (Second Round & Third Round) and the group stage will be held in Cairo, Egypt on April 27.
The Africa Cup of Nations final tournament will be played in the cities of Rabat, Agadir, Tangier and Marrakech.
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