Draw for African preliminaries for 2022 World Cup

The draw for the first round of African qualifiers for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was made in Cairo on Monday:

Below are the fixtures:

Ethiopia vs Lesotho

Somalia vs Zimbabwe

Eritrea vs Namibia

Burundi vs Tanzania

Djibouti vs Eswatini

Botswana vs Malawi

Gambia vs Angola

Liberia vs Sierra Leone

Mauritius vs Mozambique

Sao Tome &bPrincipe vs Guinea Bissau

South Sudan vs Equatorial Guinea

Comoros Islands vs Togo

Chad vs Sudan

Seychelles vs Rwanda

The ties will be played over two legs in September, with the team mentioned first playing at home in the opening leg.

The 14 winners will join the continent’s top-ranked 26 sides, who have been exempted from the initial round of qualifiers, in the next draw.

This draw is to be held on a date still to be decided.

Those 40 teams will then be split into 10 groups of four for the second qualifying round.

The 10 winners of those groups will then be drawn against each other in home-and-away fixtures, with the five victors advancing to Qatar 2022.

All Africa’s 54 member-countries are entered.

Nigeria, Senegal, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco picked the five African tickets to the last World Cup, held in 2018 in Russia.