BROW-BEATEN BREDAS

[COOKING SPOON]

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[Dammy]

A Ghanaian said “ thanks for doing us proud” to me. I couldn’t believe my ears!

[Lolly]

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[wiseone]

[Bigpokey24]

i do not think their issues nah the players or football, the FA is messed up. The moral is really bad. Wishing them well. dem don suffer enough. The worldcup in Qatar covered a lot of cracks. AFCON won't be fun without Ghana .. We need all CAF heavy weights in this tournaments

[Damunk]

Wow.
What is really happening to Ghanaian football?

I guess the only good news is that we don’t see that cockroach Crawlings around here nowadays, like we used to.

[Tobi17]

i do not think their issues nah the players or football, the FA is messed up. The moral is really bad. Wishing them well. dem don suffer enough. The worldcup in Qatar covered a lot of cracks. AFCON won't be fun without Ghana .. We need all CAF heavy weights in this tournaments

You can't stay a heavyweight forever except you're a well run nation like Morocco with a really good FA...teams like Angola, Comoros, Mauritania, Benin Republic etc are now becoming the new real deal in African football, even South Africa have found their mojo back. I doubt teams like Ghana, Nigeria etc will be missed that much these days in major tournaments, football has rapidly moved on.

But Ghana will be back stronger, they need to go back to the youth system that always gave them success.

[Cito]

i do not think their issues nah the players or football, the FA is messed up. The moral is really bad. Wishing them well. dem don suffer enough. The worldcup in Qatar covered a lot of cracks. AFCON won't be fun without Ghana .. We need all CAF heavy weights in this tournaments

You can't stay a heavyweight forever except you're a well run nation like Morocco with a really good FA...teams like Angola, Comoros, Mauritania, Benin Republic etc are now becoming the new real deal in African football, even South Africa have found their mojo back. I doubt teams like Ghana, Nigeria etc will be missed that much these days in major tournaments, football has rapidly moved on.

But Ghana will be back stronger, they need to go back to the youth system that always gave them success.

Sometimes your posts makes one go, hmmmmm.

Any major tourney in Africa without SE is missing a major factor.

[Bigpokey24]

i do not think their issues nah the players or football, the FA is messed up. The moral is really bad. Wishing them well. dem don suffer enough. The worldcup in Qatar covered a lot of cracks. AFCON won't be fun without Ghana .. We need all CAF heavy weights in this tournaments

You can't stay a heavyweight forever except you're a well run nation like Morocco with a really good FA...teams like Angola, Comoros, Mauritania, Benin Republic etc are now becoming the new real deal in African football, even South Africa have found their mojo back. I doubt teams like Ghana, Nigeria etc will be missed that much these days in major tournaments, football has rapidly moved on.

But Ghana will be back stronger, they need to go back to the youth system that always gave them success.

spoken like someone who just started watching football. Post Morocco's football pedigree next to that of Ghana or Nigeria.. talk less of the minnows you've listed. Do not confuse qualifiers to that of tournament football. Qualifiers are based on form and not logistics/youtube highlights . Sometimes i ponder how you view things,

Ghana is an African power house and their current issues has nothing to do with the ball on the green grass. They had 8 regulars not in the game vs Angola. I also think they will qualify for the world-cup. They need to fix the FA and get a good ground for their national team

[bret- hart]

All Ghana needed is a new coach and they will be back in business. Otto Addo like Egu is a bum. They always have good players. Their current crop isn't as great as the Essien set but they are good enough to at least qualify. Nigeria needs to take note of their decline bcos our NFF is 100x worse than the GFA.

[Bigpokey24]

[Kabalega]

Wow.
What is really happening to Ghanaian football?

I guess the only good news is that we don’t see that cockroach Crawlings around here nowadays, like we used to.

If you were S. African, you would attack Nigerians on SA soil.
If you were in the US, you would campaign for Trump’s mass deportations.

[airwolex]

All Ghana needed is a new coach and they will be back in business. Otto Addo like Egu is a bum. They always have good players. Their current crop isn't as great as the Essien set but they are good enough to at least qualify. Nigeria needs to take note of their decline bcos our NFF is 100x worse than the GFA.

Very decent bunch. Kudus, Semanya, Ayew, WIlliams, Lamptey. The talent is there.

[wiseone]

[Lolly]

But see how armchair coaches are exposing the schoolboy errors of professionals. Unbelievable.

[Bigpokey24]

[wiseone]

This is simply glorious. By comparison Ghana’s mess is making Nigeria's recent performances seem like a golden generation.

No organisation, leadership or direction: Ghana are wasting a generation of talent https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... SApp_Other

No organisation, leadership or direction: Ghana are wasting a generation of talent
Jonathan Wilson
They should be one of the Africa Cup of Nations favourites, instead Ghana are facing up to another chaotic failure

What made it especially painful was that, just briefly, it seemed they might get away with it. But they did not. Ghana did not get the win they needed in Angola on Friday and so Mohammed Kudus, Thomas Partey and Antoine Semenyo will not be at the next Cup of Nations, which begins in Morocco in December 2025.

Ghana have been terrible in the qualifiers. Their elimination is deserved. They went into their final pair of games needing to win both and hope Sudan lost both of theirs. The likelihood was that it would all be over on Thursday, when Sudan, managed by the former Ghana coach Kwesi Appiah, which has added a whole other tier of complication, went to Niger. But Niger won, 4-0. Nobody had expected that. For Ghana there was a glimmer of hope.

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But it meant winning in Angola. After 18 minutes, Jordan Ayew whipped a 35-yard free-kick into the top corner, the sort of goal that belongs in legends, that the gods surely wouldn’t waste on a tame exit. Then Abdul Manaf Nurudeen saved M’Bala Nzola’s penalty with an outstretched foot. Add in the fact that the coach, Otto Addo, and his two assistants, the former West Ham defender John Paintsil and the former goalkeeper Fatau Dauda, suffered only minor injuries in a car crash in September when a pick-up swerved into their lane, and it all seemed ordained. At half-time the myths were already being written about a famous night in Luanda after a turbulent qualifying campaign leading to who knows what glory in Morocco.

The truth, though, is that there is a fecklessness to this Ghana. They are not missing out on the finals because of misfortune or a tough draw. They are missing out because they do not do the basic things well. Or, at times, at all. When Zini, in the middle of the goalmouth, eight yards out, headed in Felício Milson’s cross to equalise after 64 minutes, the closest player to him was his teammate Antonio Hossi. Ghana barely threatened after that, their Cup of Nations campaign ending, anticlimactically, more than a year before the finals begin. Sudan, meanwhile, are on the brink of qualification, which, given the civil war has meant they have had to play their home games in Libya, would be a remarkable achievement.

Ghana have not missed out since 2004, their only failure to qualify since the finals expanded to more than eight teams. They’re a fixture. By winning the tournament in 1963 and 1965, the Black Stars established themselves as the first great sub-Saharan African team. In the six tournaments between 2006 and 2017, they always got to at least the semi-final. At the moment they could call on not only Partey, Kudus and Semenyo, but also Iñaki Williams, Abdul Fatawu and Tariq Lamptey. Yet results have been waning. After a penalty shootout defeat by Tunisia in the last 16 in 2019, they have twice been eliminated in the group stage. In all three games in 2022 they conceded after the 80th minute, eliminated by an embarrassing 3-2 defeat by Comoros.

Milovan Rajevac was sacked for those performances in Cameroon, replaced by Addo with Chris Hughton as technical director. Two fine defensive performances helped them overcome their great rivals Nigeria on penalties in their World Cup qualifying playoff two years ago but, in Qatar, there was a wildness as they were eliminated in the group. Earlier this year at the Cup of Nations, with Hughton installed as head coach, the failings of two years earlier returned. They conceded a last-minute winner to Cape Verde, let a lead slip against Egypt and then, crushingly, having been 2-0 up against Mozambique, gave up two goals in injury time. The pattern has become horribly familiar: as the clock ticks down, Ghana panic.

Ghana’s Abdul Fatawu (right) attempts to go past Angola’s Antonio Hossi during their 1-1 draw that sealed the Black Stars’ fate.

Hughton was sacked after the fiasco in Ivory Coast, with Addo returning. There had been a sense that Addo would restore some panache. Hughton’s cautious approach never seemed a good fit, which was one of the reasons he was personally threatened in the team hotel in Abidjan. But results have been dismal, the curse of late goals upsetting them again.

At home to Angola, Ghana conceded a 93rd-minute winner to Milson. Four days later, everything got a lot worse as Oumar Sako’s 81st-minute equaliser ensured Ghana dropped points away to Niger. Last month, they took a single point from two games against Sudan. Humiliatingly, they had to switch the home game from Kumasi to Accra because of safety concerns at the Baba Yara Stadium. Even then it took emergency upgrade work to get the stadium in the capital ready. That speaks of years of neglect.

The response of the president of the Ghana Football Association, Kurt Okraku, was to deliver a 15-minute speech to players before kick-off (broadcast on YouTube, of course). “Once you come here and you put on the shirt, that should give you the pride to fight, show passion, aggression, desire to win for your country,” he said. “When you draw games and I see players laughing, smiling, [it] is not acceptable. Thirty million people are suffering.” They drew 0-0; nobody was laughing or smiling. And still the situation got worse as Ghana lost the return 2-0.

So what’s gone wrong? There’s been talk of problems in youth development and it’s true that results have declined significantly since they won the Under-20 World Cup in 2009. Perhaps some sense of togetherness or collective style has been lost, but there’s no shortage of talented players.

The problem is getting them to play together. Semenyo, Lamptey and Williams were among eight withdrawals from the present squad. Partey was left out having withdrawn from the squad for the two games against Sudan, only to be available immediately for Arsenal. With Addo having in effect retired André Ayew from international football, that leaves the squad short of leaders.

Leadership, organisation, direction are generally lacking. There have been seven changes of coach since Avram Grant left in 2017, for which Okraku has to take responsibility. If players start to wonder whether it’s really worth pushing themselves to join a shambolic national squad, can they be blamed? With the talent available, Ghana should have gone to Morocco as one of the favourites. That they will not be there is the result of a profound carelessness.