Tunisia vs Senegal Predictions, Betting Tips and Match Previews

Tunisia come into the African Cup of Nations having had a rather poor build up to the competition. They have only won one of their four friendlies leading up to the African Cup of Nations,losing to Egypt and Basque Country and drawing against Mauritania.

This doesn’t bode well for the coming group stages, as they need to somehow earn results against either Algeria or Senegal to stand any chance of upsetting the pecking order and qualify for the knockout rounds. Tunisia weren’t overly confident in their qualifiers for the tournament either, picking up 13 points from their six games and only outdoing Togo by two points in the end.

The underdogs will undoubtedly be looking towards Sunderland’s Wahbi Khazri and Ittihad’s Ahmed Akaichi for attacking inspiration here.  Khazri has managed a squad topping ten goals from his 28 international appearances, whilst Akaichi has nine goals in his 22 international outings.

However, they face a very tough opponent in Senegal. They have in demand Napoli centre back Kalidou Koulibaly leading the defence, with fellow European based players in Cheikh M’Bengue and Zargo Toure also in the back line. The midfield consists of the likes of Idrissa Gueye, Mohamed Diame, Cheikhou Kouyate, and Henri Saivet, whilst they can rely on Sadio Mane and Moussa Sow up front.

This well balanced squad served them very well in qualifying as they earned the only perfect record in qualification, winning all six of their matches and conceding just two goals in the process.

Senegal’s two warm up friendlies saw them pick up wins against Libya and Congo, to make it eight wins and one defeat in their last nine matches. They have only conceded in three of these matches, and they have scored exactly two goals in eight of them.

This excellent record and talented squad makes them one of the favourites to lift the trophy in February, but first things first they must qualify from their group. Sadio Mane has been in sensational form for Liverpool this season, scoring nine goals in the Premier League and bagging four assists as well. He doesn’t fail to deliver for Senegal either, so backing him to score anytime at 13/5 looks a good choice for our goalscorer predictions.

In terms of the overall result I can’t look beyond Senegal for this one. They have been in excellent form over the past year or so and come into this tournament high on confidence and with one of the most well balanced and talented squads around. Odds of 23/20 for a Senegal win look good value for money, so I’m going for that along with a 2-0 correct score predictions at 8/1.