No knee-jerk action against coach Milo, please

Ghanaians are still seething with red-hot anger following the abysmal performance of the Black Stars in Cameroon, and rightly so. While some have directed their anger at the players, others have made the coach the scapegoat.

Yet still, others blame the Ghana Football Association (GFA), others the Chairman of the GFA, others the Ministry of Youth and Sports (MOYS) and others, the entire government machinery.

As a Ghanaian, I am yet to overcome the trauma of the loss, but at the same time, I have soberly reflected over the whole caboodle and I think what we need now is to allow cooler heads to reign.

It is in the light of these diverse sentiments that I have chosen to react to the general outcry for the coach of the team to be fired. The late Ato Austin, former PNDC Secretary for Youth and Sports, once said that, in Ghana, when you are chalking successes, everyone will sing your praises.

The day you experience failure, they will dig up your past, beginning from the day you were born, highlight all your failures, real and imagined and heap insults on your grandparents, parents, uncles, aunties, children and anyone remotely related to you. That is the Ghanaian for you.

When Milovan Rajevac was unveiled as the “new” coach of the Black Stars, there was general optimism among Ghanaians because he had done it before with the team. However, there were a few voices of dissent, especially those who believed that second comings do not often yield good results.

After playing the qualifying matches for the next world cup, these sentiments did not change much even though the Black Stars qualified for the final playoffs. The pessimists even said that the team did not play good soccer. This was, perhaps, unfair to the coach because he had little time to know the players, not to talk of moulding them into a cohesive unit.

It was thought that the fourteen days for preparation of the team for AFCON 2021 will give the coach sufficient time to put his stamp on the team. Players were to move to camp in Qatar on 27th December 2021, play three friendly matches and proceed to Cameroon on 7th January 2022. That was not to be. The affected European clubs managed to convince FIFA to compel CAF to change the reporting schedule for the players.

The new arrangement was that they would report to camp on 3rd January after honouring club matches. At the time the Black Stars played their only friendly match on 5th January, most of the players had not arrived in camp; those who arrived had not trained for even a day. Others eventually joined the team in Cameroon a day before the opening ceremony.

Given those circumstances, it was clear that the team had not prepared sufficiently for the tournament. Milo is not a magician. How could he mould these individual stars into a team within that short period of time? The Black Stars was not therefore a team but a group of individuals put together. Some critics have compared Milo to the interim coach of Nigeria, but their circumstances are different.

It is true Austin Eguavoen took over barely two weeks to the tournament, but he was already the technical director and knew all the players even before he took over. Moreover, since 2006, when he first handled the Super Eagle, he had not been too far from the team. Milo spent three months in the country, yet he hardly knew all the players.

That is why experts have claimed that the Black Stars used the tournament to train, which explains why the team improved after the first match before its implosion against Comoros following the red card shown to the leader. The coach may take some of the blame, but he is not entirely responsible for the failure of the Black Stars.

At this point, let me pose the following questions: Was the coach responsible for the confusion in our defence, where the ball accidentally deflected off Partey’s foot and landed invitingly for Soufiane Boufal to blast into the net? Was the coach responsible for our players’ loss of concentration, when they expected the Gabonese to return the ball to them following Kofi Kyere’s injury?

Was the coach responsible for the red card shown to Dede Ayew which compelled the team to play for 70 minutes with only ten players? Admittedly, the coach’s tactics when we were down to 10 players created spaces for the Comorians to exploit, but those same tactics enabled us to claw back the two goals we conceded before we were undone by the winning goal for them.

When the two fullbacks were withdrawn, the wingers were expected to track back and assist the defenders. Unfortunately, some of the players appeared too tired to cope. Joseph Paintsil, for instance, never helped the defence, which led to the final goal.

People have never stopped talking of the fact that Ghana won the same tournament four times, all under local coaches. That is true, but in the 1963 and 1965 tournaments, only three or four countries participated. Moreover, only local players were involved, so the team had long uninterrupted training programmes.

Most countries were not football-conscious; indeed, Sudan, Ethiopia and Congo were the linchpins of African soccer at that time. In the 1978 AFCOM, hosted by Ghana, all the players were home-based.

An abridged football league was played after which the team was in camp for over six months. They, therefore, played as a team. In the 1982 AFCOM, about four or five players were playing professionally outside Ghana, most of them for low-level teams, so they were easily released for camping.

Do not also forget that the revolutionary fervour of Jerry John Rawlings greatly inspired the boys to do the impossible by winning the tournament in faraway Libya. One cannot, therefore, compare those Black Stars teams to the Black Stars of today, where 23 of the 28 players who made the final squad for Cameroon 2022 play outside Ghana, mostly in Europe.

Some other people are agitating for local players to form the core of the team. To them, I have a simple explanation. The last time, our champion club played in continental matches, it was whitewashed 5-0 and 4-0 by North African teams. That is the standard of our league. We used to have a “Local Black Stars” team which participated in a tournament for home-based players.

Ghana has failed to qualify for that tournament for a number of years now, because our team is weak. The fact is that, as soon as a player can kick the ball from the goal post to the centre circle, he is looking for a professional contract, not only in Europe, but remote leagues in places like Tanzania, Lebanon, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. We may have a few good local players, which explains why Fatawu Issahaku, David Abagna, Maxwell Abbey Quaye and Richard Atta were part of the team.

When the coach lamented at his press conference that he did not have a striker like Asamoah Gyan in the current team, people asked why he did not invite him. Others said Asamoah Gyan should be brought back and made captain, because it was the nature of his removal as captain that cast a spell on the team. Such people are living in the past. Asamoah Gyan has effectively retired from football, even if he has not said so himself. The last team he played for was in the local Ghanaian league for a team called Legon Cities. He did not score a single goal, not even a penalty goal and was released this season. If people are so enamoured with past players, then we might as well invite Rev Osei Kofi, who is still alive, Mohammed Polo and Abedi Pele to form the core of the team. Let’s avoid living in the past.

I don’t want to accord a modicum of acknowledgement to the superstitious voices out there who are giving all sorts of reasons for the Black Stars failure. Claims such as Dede Ayew should apologise to some past players, the FA should apologise to Kwesi Appiah, Jordan and Dede Ayew should not play in the match at the same time and all those prophets of doom are just fear mongers. Some even advocate for state houses to be given to the 1978 squad, as promised by the then head of state, to lift a supposed curse. Modern football thrives on proper planning and preparation and not superstitious quick-fix solutions.

That is why I urge the government, the MOYS, the GFA and all those who matter in Ghana football not to take any knee-jerk decision on coach Milo’s contract. He was appointed coach of the team and tasked to win the AFCOM which he failed to do. He was also tasked to qualify the team for the 2022 Qatar World Cup, which still pending. If he fails, then we chuck him out. Let us give him the needed support and encouragement to prepare the team for that herculean task. Now he has the core of his team and may only need to make a few adjustments to have a winsome side. I have a feeling that, whoever we meet in the final playoffs, we are capable of qualifying for Qatar 2022. Who would have thought that the defending champions and the current Arab champions, Algeria, would be knocked out in the first round? Who would have imagined that Gambia will beat Tunisia, one of the powerhouses of African football? The shocks are not yet over, because there are no more minnows in football. For instance, people see Equatorial Guinea as a team from a small country. It will surprise you to know that, at least, eight of their players were born in Spain, while others play in other junior leagues in Europe.

When I joined the Ghana Armed Forces in 1990, I pledged to defend my country by land, sea or air, even at the peril of my life. I always endeavoured to do just that at all material times. In the process, I lost some colleagues, friends and comrades, but by God’s grace, I have lived to tell my story. That has been my contribution to my nation.

Every Ghanaian, be you a soldier, policeman, politician, engineer, doctor, lawyer, pastor, wherever you find yourself, you owe it a duty to this nation to do your level best for Ghana. That is what is expected of the Black Stars. They are not doing anyone a favour; they are simply doing their patriotic duty to their nation.

I believe they tried to do their best, but it was not good enough. They did not go out there intending to lose. When I saw blood gushing out of the head of Dede Ayew in our match against Morocco, I said he was shedding his blood for the motherland.

That is the spirit. Let’s die for the motherland, wherever we find ourselves, from the President of the Republic to the ordinary man on the street, because Ghana is the only country we have.