A national team must be truly national – coach of British soccer club, Arsenal, Arsene Wenger.
Let Avram Grant be our last expat coach. And, promise Ghanaians never again will you bring a non-Ghanaian to coach the Black Stars, the Black Queens, the Black Meteors, Black Satellites, Black Starlets, Black Sticks, or any other national team in existence, or which will be revived, or formed in future. Dissolve the current national team. Draw pragmatic strategies to form a new Black Stars. Give a radical shake-up to the Ghana Football Association and, indeed, the whole National Sports Council. But, back to this coach who goes by the name Avram Grant. Straight away, let me say that neither I nor the average Ghanaian hated him personally out of xenophobia. The right-thinking Ghanaian hates the thinking behind bringing Avram Grant, Claude Leroy, Milovan Rajivac, Ratomir Djokovic or any other foreigner to teach Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana how to play football. Are we not capable of managing our own affairs? If we can rule ourselves, if we can manage the United Nations for pretty eight years through our illustrious son, Busumuru Kofi Annan, why do we ridicule ourselves by pretending incapable of teaching ourselves how to kick a small inflated leather case into the goalpost on the green pitch?
If our own son, Charles Kumi (C. K.) Gyamfi, captained the Black Stars to win an African Cup and later coached the same national team to win the same coveted trophy, why don’t we build confidence in our own coaches? If in 1982 Osam Duodu, the Ghanaian, was given nothing but just Jerry Rawlings’s order to go to Libya and bring the African Cup and, he went, he saw and he conquered; why at all should we call Avram Grant 32 years later and give him US$50,000 every month to achieve nothing? I say let Avram Grant be last foreign coach and promise us never again shall Ghanaians be subjected to such an affront in this dear land of ours. Akwasi Appiah qualified the Stars to the 2014 World Cup, beating these same Pharaohs on the way by 6 – 1. But, during Avram’s time, Egypt have beaten Ghana two solid times! Why? In spite of the $50, 000.00 every 30 days? What this man took every month surpassed what our President takes in a quarter; fatter than the paycheck of our biggest captains of industry. And this man often stayed weeks abroad, returned to sit quietly at the bench till our team was down and the referee was looking at his wrist-watch before Grant did some frivolous changes in his team? Our past government should have long sacked Avram Grant and replaced him with Akwasi Appiah, Bashiru Hayford, Augustine Arhinful, Sellas Tetteh, or some other Ghanaian. Now that he is resigning, give a third of his treasure to a Ghanaian or some other African and use the rest to develop our sports facilities. The Ohene-Djan (sorry, Accra) Sports Stadium is in disrepair while the pay of one disappointing coach could have done substantial repairs every month. That is how we have ordered our priorities in this country so far.
When Egypt conquered Africa incessantly a decade or so ago, they did it – not under any foreigner – but their own national. The fella was called Hassan Shehata, if my memory serves me right. No non-Ghanaian coach has won us anything respectable. When we won the World Under-20 in 2009, was it not our own Sellas ‘Borbor’ Tetteh who did the magic from the touchlines? Were these Camerounians who just lifted the trophy in Libreville not local players? Largely they were. And that leads us to the next diktat: minimise the importation of players.
For commonsense sake, please stop global-trotting scouting for Ghanaians warming the benches at the sidelines. I propose that at least 12 – majority so to speak – of each of our 23-person AFCON and other squads should, henceforth, be local players. I’m asking this new sports ministry leadership and new government to pass a law to back my high local content demand. We should stop this fetish of inviting Ghanaian sportspeople from Europe, America and Asia: often they fail to gel. They exhibit their individual skills but guard their limbs for the clubs that pay them the dollars and euros. Let our West African sports ministries revive the ECOWAS sports festivals including the West African Football Union League. African sports ministries must do all it takes to strengthen the CHAN and AFCON such that all matches attract spectators to fill our stadiums to capacity. Make Ghana, sub-regional and continental soccer rich and attractive. That is the way to retain interest and players, as well as attract investors and other participants into the game. This and subsequent Ghanaian governments should increase and improve existing sports – not just football – academies. The few available belong to individuals who charge rather exorbitantly. Is it not criminal negligence that regime after regime has supervised the ailment and eventual demise of Ghana’s colts soccer, Academicals, Meteors and several other nurseries that offered our senior teams a huge pool to tap from?
Ghana is a soccer-eating nation. Nearly, all of Africa’s sports and games have been allowed to die and, today, we crave soccer. The average African thinks soccer more than half the time. Europe and America retain the dozens of sports they have. Africa achieves the least honours when we meet at the World Cup and the Olympics. We get too little returns on the moneys and our hearts we invest in soccer. The last time Ghana won the African Cup, the current sports minister may have been in class one. And yet, all our thoughts and prayers remain in soccer, hoping against hope that we will win the World Cup or the AFCON for a fifth time. Kotoko is a pale shadow of herself. Hearts exists only by name. New additions have never really established themselves. The stadiums are now the abode for reptiles, paupers and the insane. The cafés are filled to the brim when any ordinary British, Spanish or Italian clubs are playing. After they have given you the lineup and reserve bench for Manchester United, Chelsea, Barcelona or AC Milan, ask the Ghanaian youth to give you just three players in the club currently topping the local league. And, they will scratch their head or brush you aside.
Let us do field and track events, hockey, ping-pong, boxing and all the others as seriously as Kwame Nkrumah started us on. If soccer is to remain the first among equals, we need to invest wisely in it and stop signing on keep-fit instructors who come with interpreters who must be paid more dollars than the assistant coaches who are Ghanaian. Use Ghanaian coaches and majority of local players.
My lesson from the match against Cameroun, the match against Burkina Faso, the whole Gabon tournament is that you cannot present a wishy-washy team against a better team and hope God has no other nationality apart from being a Ghanaian and, so, will help you win necessarily. My other lesson is a commonsensical observation by Albert Einstein which was reiterated by Papa Kwesi Nduom while he canvassed for votes as presidential candidate of the Convention People’s Party in 2008. You cannot do the same thing repeatedly and expect different results.
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