THE OTHER NATIONAL TEAM · TUNISIA
During the men’s World Cup, FemGol will trace the history of some of the women’s national teams from the countries taking to the pitch. Because a country’s football doesn’t fit in a single team.
Mariem Houij received the ball when the match had barely begun, ran into the space, beat Togo’s defence, slipped past the goalkeeper and bundled the ball into the net.
Seventeen seconds had passed.
There had been no time for the game to settle, for each side to take stock of the match in front of them, or for Tunisia to remember how long they had waited to return to that stage.
The clock read 00:17.
It was the fastest goal in the history of the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations.
But for Tunisia it was not just a record.
It was the shortest possible way of announcing that they existed again.
Fourteen years
Tunisia’s first appearance at an African finals had come in 2008. They won no matches and went out in the group stage, but they had appeared on the continental stage for the first time.
Then they disappeared from the Africa Cup.
Not for a single season, nor for one qualifying cycle. Fourteen years passed before they played the tournament again.
While other teams piled up competitions, generations and defeats to learn from, Tunisia had to rebuild their international presence. The side that returned in 2022 was not continuing a story: it was trying to resume one.
Mariem Houij embodied that difficult continuity.
She had spent years in the national team and had moved through France and Turkey to build a professional career far from home. During qualifying for the 2022 Africa Cup she struck a hat-trick in the first leg against Equatorial Guinea.
By the time Tunisia returned to the continental tournament, she had been waiting far too long for that moment.
She needed seventeen seconds.
Ninety minutes that changed the scale
Houij’s goal opened a 4-1 win over Togo. It was Tunisia’s first victory at an Africa Cup finals and their highest-scoring match in the competition’s history.
They then lost to Zambia and Cameroon, but the format allowed them to go through as one of the best third-placed sides.
Tunisia were in the quarter-finals.
South Africa, the future champions, knocked them out 1-0. The run still offered one last chance: a match against Senegal for a place in the intercontinental play-off tournament for the 2023 World Cup.
The game finished goalless. Senegal won on penalties and took the ticket to extend their World Cup journey.
Tunisia were left one shoot-out away from keeping the dream of their first Women’s World Cup alive.
The distance looked small. It was no longer measured in decades of absence, but in one match, one shoot-out or one better night.
That was the real change of 2022.
Tunisia did not become a power. They became a team for whom losing was beginning to hurt, because of what they might have achieved.
Three hundred and eighty-eight minutes
The next tournament was meant to confirm the growth.
The 2024 Africa Cup of Nations, postponed until July 2025, was again held in Morocco. Tunisia arrived with Houij as their reference point, a renewed squad and the intention of proving that the previous quarter-finals had not been an exception.
Nigeria undid that expectation in the first match.
Tunisia lost 3-0 without registering a single shot on target, with 28% possession and only 97 completed passes. They had never finished a match in the competition below a hundred.
The defeat extended a drought that, before they faced Algeria, already stood at 388 minutes without scoring at the Africa Cup. Since that 4-1 against Togo, Tunisia had played four full matches at the tournament without celebrating a goal again.
Against Algeria they held on for a 0-0 draw.
Against Botswana, Yesmin Khanchouch finally ended a wait that was already approaching five hundred minutes. She scored in the 12th minute and briefly restored the possibility of qualifying.
Tunisia were winning 1-0.
Botswana equalised in the second half and Ontlametse settled the match in added time. Tunisia finished bottom of the group, with one point, one goal for and no wins.
It had needed close to five hundred minutes to score again.
Added time was enough to knock them out.
One goal
The next fall had come even before Tunisia played that tournament.
In February 2025, the team faced Kenya in the first qualifying round for the 2026 Africa Cup of Nations. The first leg, played in Nairobi, finished 0-0.
The return was played in Sousse.
Tereza Engesha scored for Kenya in the first half. Tunisia had the rest of the match to respond, and could not.
A single goal eliminated the Eagles of Carthage.
Kenya kept advancing and ended up securing their place at the finals. Tunisia, by contrast, were left out of an edition that would later be expanded from twelve to sixteen teams.
They will not be in Morocco in the summer of 2026.
The women’s national team that had taken fourteen years to return is once again watching the Africa Cup from the outside.
Seventeen seconds
When Tunisia’s men play their final World Cup match against the Netherlands in the early hours of Friday, they will do so already eliminated.
Their campaign can be summed up in three results.
The women’s cannot be contained in a three-match table.
Their story is made of timescales that hold no proportion to one another: fourteen years to come back, seventeen seconds to score, a continental drought that approached five hundred minutes and a single goal to be left out once more.
That is why Mariem Houij’s goal still matters.
Not because it turned Tunisia into something they were not yet. Nor because it announced an inevitable growth that never came.
It matters because it showed how quickly a team can appear when, at last, it is allowed to be there.
Seventeen seconds were enough to exist again.
The problem is all the time it still takes to keep that existence from being interrupted once more.
