GFA, Black Stars is no team now!

I have made some observations on the performance of the Black Stars in recent times and wish to make recommendations to help the team improve.

I think the Ghanaian football fraternity, especially sports journalists and radio presenters, have to offer solutions instead of always making post-match comments on the Black Stars’ poor performances.

There is an adage that “If you can’t carry the load on your head, don’t blame your piece of wrapped cloth on your head to help you carry the load”.

The handlers of the Black Stars always feel our coaches are not good enough and, therefore, keep changing them. From Kwasi Appiah to C.K. Akonnor, Chis Hughton and currently Otto Addo, have things changed for the better?

We also keep changing players and think that kind of inconsistency can do us any good.

Football is about consistency and effective training, coupled with better goal-scoring ability, which our current Black Stars lack.

Satisfactory performance

How can the senior national team perform satisfactorily? As of now, the blame is being shifted to the poor nature of the Baba Yara Stadium pitch. If the pitch wasn’t good for the Black Stars at home, why did the Angolans play on the same pitch and win away?

Again, the Black Stars had a good pitch in Morocco against less-fancied Niger and drew 1-1. In my view, the Ghana Football Association (GFA) must sit up and build a base team.

The selection of so-called star players from foreign teams will do us no good as we are witnessing nowadays.

I was surprised to hear Coach Otto Addo claim recently that none of our National Premier League footballers qualifies to play for the senior national team.

I don’t share that view because even one of the best teams in the world, Barcelona, recently poached two players from the Ghana league. What is Coach Otto Addo, therefore, talking about?

My advice to the GFA is to form a constant Ghana-based Black Stars and blend them with the foreign-based players to get a formidable team to constitute the Black Stars.

The Black Stars we are now seeing is no team but a collection of foreign-based Ghanaian players who come together and train for one or two days only to prepare for matches. That is why they usually perform poorly.

Please, let us change the Black Stars’ preparation towards matches and the good results will start coming to make football-loving Ghanaians happy again.

Researcher

I have been a private soccer researcher and analyst for almost 40 years now. Through my research work, I introduced the once-used Golden Goal rule to FIFA as far back as 1986 after the Mexico World Cup, but no official recognition or reward has been given to me by FIFA up to now.

FIFA is still struggling to find a solution to the deadlock problem in football. The regulation time and energy-sapping extra time is equally outmoded and does not break deadlocks most of the time.

I think that the current situation must be replaced with a way to break deadlocks to avoid the dreaded lottery of penalty shootouts in this Information Technology (IT) era.

I am not holding brief for myself, but when it comes to the technicalities of football, counting me out may be difficult.

Even the technical points system FIFA adopted at the Russia 2018 World Cup was also my idea. Soccer lovers who have followed me over the years can attest to that.

John B.K Amoah,
(a.k.a. Mr. Golden Goal).