The Manchester City defender Kolo Toure has said that he is in support of the rotation policy adopted by the Ivory Coast manager Sabri Lamouchi at the 2013 African cup of nations. The Ivory Coast is certainly under pressure to win this tournament after coming extremely close to doing so in the last few years. Ivory Coast have not managed to be crowned as the African champions in 1992. The star players like Didier Drogba and Kolo Toure are coming to the end of their careers, which has increased the pressure on the team to deliver this trophy.
The coach Sabri Lamouchi has adopted a policy to protect his players in the group stages of the tournament by rotating them frequently. This has raised questions amongst the media, but the defender Kolo Toure was supportive of the manager by saying that rotation was necessary in order to deal with the huge number of games. Kolo Toure was on the bench for the match against Tunisia on Saturday. The captain Didier Drogba was also put on the bench by the manager, but the Elephants managed to win this match 3-0 in the end. Touré has said that the players do not mind being rested because they only want to win the trophy.
“That’s great for us. The most important thing is that we lift the trophy. It doesn’t matter who plays and who doesn’t play. We want to go back home with this trophy. We have such great players in Ivory Coast, it’s very important to give them a chance to play and the guys that came into the team were unbelievable. It was a fantastic performance from the team. We played as a group. In the first game we won but didn’t play very well,” said the defender Kolo Toure after the match.