THE Group of Death has always been an ugly misnomer, although as every big tournament now seems obliged to identify its corpses early, the World Cup has to have one. In the case of Group C, the tag might also be considered rather tasteless. Some of the participants — those from Serbia, Montenegro and the Ivory Coast — have grown up in an uncomfortably close proximity to war and violence. From here on, Group C stands for Group of Class.

It is crowded with talent, overcrowded. Ivory Coast, Argentina, Holland and the former Yugoslavs make up not four strong nations but technically five.

Last month Montenegrins voted for independence from Serbia, just as Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Slovenians and Macedonians before them voted, and often fought, for their self-determination as the Balkans broke up.

Ivory Coast is splintering, too. There are warlords who want the country split among ethnic groups, or between north and south. So when their players speak of the welcome sense of union created by a successful national team, they are not being flippant about a political crisis has turned the country from one of West Africa’s more thriving economies 10 years ago into an edgy, unstable place.

Even wealthy footballers with homes in Europe feel it, and those of a certain vintage cannot help but sense a requirement to the state to provide good news. Under a previous Ivorian government six years ago, the national squad were detained in an army barracks for having underperformed at the 2000 African Cup of Nations. They had their phones and passports taken from them and at one point were threatened with military conscription.

The 2006 Ivory Coast squad have earned more respect. They go to their first World Cup as standard-bearers for an African challenge that looks threadbare apart from the Elephants. Like Senegal at the 2002 tournament, Ivory Coast’s debutant status masks a worldliness among the personnel. All but one of their 23 are employed in leagues across western Europe and several have been conspicuous in the Champions League.

It would be hard to find a pair of defenders at this tournament in better form than Arsenal’s Kolo Toure and Emmanuel Eboue. Chelsea’s Didier Drogba; Toure’s brother, Yaya, of Olympiakos; and PSV Eindhoven’s Aruna Kone have just won domestic titles, and were it not for the company they have to keep in Group C, the Ivorians would be a strong fancy to match Africa’s best at a World Cup finals: the last eight.

If they don’t do it, not many expect Tunisia, Ghana, Togo or Angola to make amends on behalf of a continent preparing to host the tournament for the first time in 2010.

Ask a Cameroonian and he will tell you the wrong nations are in Germany. “From what I’ve seen, they are not the teams to represent Africa,” says Chelsea’s Geremi, whose Cameroon miss the finals for the first time in two decades. An Egyptian will point out that Ghana, Angola, Togo and Tunisia are not reigning African champions and that although Ivory Coast look more useful, they finished second to Egypt at the Nations Cup in February. Ask a Senegalese, and, well, here’s what El Hadji Diouf fears: “It could be embarrassing.”

The initial novelty around so many new names from Africa at the World Cup has turned to nervousness. For Togo, the surprise of reaching a first finals has already produced fallout. They sacked the coach who got them there, Stephen Keshi, and replaced him with the German veteran Otto Pfister.

Angola’s resources are to be examined next weekend in the most painful way: their team, based around players who might just — or actually do — perform a job in the Portuguese second division, kick off against Portugal, most of whose players are too good for the Portuguese Superliga. Tunisia are perennial fallers at the first-round hurdle, and Ghana, who have a strong midfield, are in another taxing group, with Italy, the Czech Republic and the USA .

Thus the poor Ivorians have not only to represent domestic peace and unity, but to carry surrogate hopes of Africans from Cairo to Cape Town.

Henri Michel, their head coach, can bear that. This is his fourth World Cup as a manager, with his fourth different country, and his fifth tournament as a participant. He played for France in Argentina in 1978 and gave the French their orders from the bench at Mexico in 1986. He took Cameroon to America in 1994 and Morocco to France in 1998. He was employed to take Tunisia to Japan in 2002, but lost the job three months before the tournament started. For Michel there are no Groups of Death, just the certainty that in his line, no job is for life.

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