{"id":23840,"date":"2024-03-25T13:02:35","date_gmt":"2024-03-25T13:02:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/missing-out-of-afcon-2023-title-still-hurts-troost-ekong\/"},"modified":"2024-03-25T13:02:35","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T13:02:35","slug":"missing-out-of-afcon-2023-title-still-hurts-troost-ekong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/missing-out-of-afcon-2023-title-still-hurts-troost-ekong\/","title":{"rendered":"Missing out of AFCON 2023 title still hurts \u2014 Troost-Ekong"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Nigeria defender, William Troost-Ekong says it is difficult to shake off the disappointment of failing to win the title at the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations.<\/p>\n<p>The Super Eagles came close to winning the AFCON title for the fourth time but lost 2-1 to hosts Cote d\u2019Ivoire in the final.<\/p>\n<p>Troost-Ekong gave Nigeria the lead in the first half but Cote d\u2019Ivoire rallied to win the game through goals from Franck Kessie and Sebastien Haller.<\/p>\n<p>The centre-back, who scored three goals for the Super Eagles in the competition won the Player of Tournament prize.<\/p>\n<p>Reflecting on the Super Eagles outing at AFCON 2023, Troost-Ekong said it was tough to lose the final when they were so close to glory.<br \/>\n\u201cIt was bitter-sweet in the end,\u201d he told CNN World Sports.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen you get so close all you want to do is win it, and I think the way the tournament played out with some of the more fancied nations got eliminated it just seemed like everything was working for us.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo lose in the final is hard, but being really honest Ivory Coast were better than us on the day.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut I brought home Player of the Tournament which is something special and something I wasn\u2019t expecting at all.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI still would have swapped it for a winner\u2019s medal though.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Missing out of AFCON 2023 title still hurts \u2014 Troost-Ekong<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nigeria defender, William Troost-Ekong says it is difficult to shake off the disappointment of failing to win the title at&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23841,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5907,15,160,9125],"tags":[210,110,180,201,9126],"class_list":["post-23840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-afcon-2023","category-news","category-sport","category-troost-ekong","tag-210","tag-afcon","tag-news","tag-sport","tag-troost-ekong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}