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It took 45 minutes. Marie Ngah scored in the 20th minute. Naomi Eto doubled the lead in the 29th. Ngah found her second in stoppage time at the end of the first half. Three goals, all in the opening half, from a team that had scored just four goals in their previous five matches. Cameroon are Women's Africa Cup of Nations champions for the first time in the modern era. The Indomitable Lionesses beat Malawi 3-0 at the Moulay El Hassan Stadium in Rabat on Sunday night and ended four decades of final defeats with a performance that bore no resemblance to anything they had produced in the five matches that preceded it.
The context of how they got here matters for the accounting. Cameroon initially failed to qualify for the tournament. They lost their qualifying play-off to Algeria over two legs. It was only CAF's decision to expand WAFCON from 12 to 16 teams, and Cameroon's subsequent inclusion as one of four sides added on FIFA ranking, that put them in Morocco at all. They entered the group stage without having qualified on merit. They left Rabat as continental champions. The distance between those two facts is the story of WAFCON 2026 in its most compressed form.
How the Match Was Decided
Malawi opened the final on the front foot. Tabitha Chawinga delivered a ferocious cross within the opening thirty seconds. She continued to probe with threaded passes to Temwa Chawinga in the early exchanges, and for the first quarter-hour the match moved at the pace and pattern of Malawi's previous five performances. Then the 20th minute arrived and everything changed. Marie Ngah, whose free-kick had beaten Chiamaka Nnadozie in the Nigeria quarter-final, received the ball in a central position and drove low past Mercy Sikelo. The Moulay El Hassan Stadium, which had been hosting Moroccan matches across this tournament and had not expected to be a neutral venue for its final fixture, found itself watching a Cameroonian celebration.
Nine minutes later, Naomi Eto, the PSG forward who had been Cameroon's most creative attacking presence across the knockout stage, took the ball on the edge of the Malawi penalty area and finished with composure that the scoreline was already suggesting. Two-nil. Malawi's structure, built around the transition speed of the Chawinga sisters, required the first counter-attack to go in. Neither of the first two had. The belief that had driven them through Nigeria, Ghana and Algeria was not absent in the first half. But Cameroon's defensive organisation, anchored again by Michaely Bihina who made three important saves in the opening period, meant the Chawinga sisters produced chances without converting them. In the 45th minute, Ngah completed her brace. Three-nil at half time. The final was over as a contest.
The Second Half and the Verdict
Malawi poured forward after the interval in search of the comeback that had defined their entire tournament campaign. They had beaten Nigeria from 1-0 down in the group stage and beaten Ghana from a position of difficulty in the quarter-final. The identity of a team that scores late and recovers from adversity was not going to disappear in one half. But Cameroon's defensive organisation, and Bihina's continued authority in goal, absorbed everything Malawi produced without conceding. Gabrielle Onguene thought she had added a fourth from a Rose Bella cross in stoppage time, but the flag was raised for offside. The match ended 3-0. Cameroon received the trophy. Michaely Bihina was named player of the tournament. Marie Ngah won the Golden Boot with five goals. Tabitha Chawinga, who finished with six goals across the competition, was awarded the fair play prize for the tournament's most impactful individual attacker.
The full WAFCON 2026 accounting: sixteen teams, a debutant nation in the final, a first-time champion, two sides at their first Women's World Cup in Brazil, Nigeria eliminated from automatic qualification for the first time since 1991. The tournament that began on July 26 ended on August 16 and produced more historically significant results than any previous edition of the competition. Cameroon were not expected to be there. They were there anyway. They won. Sport Blot will carry the full post-tournament analysis across the coming days.
