By Kofi Akordor
BY now Goran Stevanovic, the Serbian coach who contributed to our national disgrace, is sitting somewhere in Europe, possibly his home country, taking a cool breeze while sipping vintage wine or taking tots of malt whiskey and pondering over where to go next.
His Ghanaian accomplices in the Football Association, led by President Kwesi Nyantakyi, are equally counting their gains while plotting where to go next to bring another white-skinned coach to come and do more damage to our football.
Plavi (as they call the coach) has nothing to worry about. He came to assemble players who have gone through the tutelage of local coaches from the colts era to the present and, without any new strategies or tactics, pushed them into battle. And for that he is given a good amount of cash which Ghanaian coaches can never dream about.
If we had won the cup, he would have taken all the glory. But now that we have lost, he can abandon us for his home country and blame everything on the players who, he says, did not take his instructions, while we lick our wounds in sober quietness. And why not? He could afford to relax somewhere musing over his fortune while we groan in anger for a lost opportunity.
Stevanovic is part of a long list of foreign coaches who, strangely, have been the darling of our football administrators but who, predictably, always leave us disappointed.
Why we are so obsessed with foreign coaches is an enigma because there are no facts on the ground to support that line of choice.
Ghana has won the Africa Cup four times and on all those occasions we conquered Africa with local coaches. The trail blazer was Charles Kumi (CK) Gyamfi who, as player/coach, led the Black Stars to win the cup in 1963.
In 1965, Ghana defended the cup under C.K. Gyamfi, who had then become a full-time coach. The Stars won the cup the third time in 1978 under Coach Osam Duodu. Our last conquest was in 1982, under good old C.K. Gyamfi.
Dear readers, if these are undisputable facts, where is that madness which makes the appointment of foreign coaches sacrosanct coming from? Some of these coaches cannot speak the English Language and come with their own interpreters, whereas our performance never justified their presence here.
Is it the old disease of inferiority complex that is haunting us? Or is it some intricate clauses embedded in the appointment clauses which enable some people to make personal fortunes at our national interest?
As recent as 2009, Coach Sellas Tetteh groomed some youngsters who took the world by storm and succeeded in winning the FIFA Under-20 World Cup to enter the history books as the first African team to attain that feat.
When the opportunity offered itself for us to pick a new coach for the national football team to replace Ratomir Dukovic, a Serbian, who abandoned us soon after the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the great men of the FA felt that if it would be a Ghanaian, then it better be another Serbian. So they opted for Milovan Rajevic.
Rajevic took us to the World Cup in South Africa and we all saw his contorted face when the Black Stars beat his Serbian national team. Some of us saw the danger there, but not those who are running the affairs of our national football.
So it came to pass that we had to search for another coach after Rajevic also deserted us for oil money in Saudi Arabia soon after South Africa 2010. Some of us raised our voices, insisting that it was time we lived up to our accolade as the Star of Africa and take the destiny of our country into own hands, if for nothing at all, at least in football.
Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah proved the point that it could be done as far back as 1963 and 1965. But the voices of nationalism, self-reliance and national pride were drowned by opportunism, inferiority complex and self-aggrandisement.
Not surprisingly, we went in for another Serbian who, by then, knew that there was cheap money to be made in a country called Ghana. That time he was in the person of Goran Stevanovic. Stevanovic would tell us he was going to Europe to monitor our foreign-based players and go and sleep somewhere.
Why should he bother to do any monitoring when the boys are already in Europe plying their trade? All he needed to do was invite them at the appropriate time, put them together for a few days and then push them into action, with very little input from him. He was not interested in the local league and never visited our league centres to monitor the performance of local players to pick those with potential for a possible inclusion in the senior national team.
If we succeed, it is good news for all. When we fail, we swallow our national pride, pick a few of the players and heap insults on them to assuage our pain and ease tension. Meanwhile, the foreign coach on whom we have invested a lot of funds goes away, only for another of his type to be employed.
Incidentally, these foreign coaches come here to meet already-groomed players — players who have been unearthed in their raw state and groomed into polished and refined players by local coaches to play in professional leagues in Europe and elsewhere.
Our players went to AFCON 2012 without any strategy but to exhibit individual talents. Our exit at the semi-finals is quite painful, to say the least, and no one should tell us that a foreign coach will make things better next time.
Cote d’Ivoire went to the same tournament with a local coach and a good game plan which yielded results, even though they were not the eventual winners.
Nobody is against foreign football coaches, just as nobody is against a foreign medical officer, a foreign engineer or a foreign teacher. What some of us are saying is that excessive reliance on everything foreign, including football coaches, is becoming a national obsession which is not helping us move on as a people. If a foreign coach is the last resort, let us go for one, and a very good one, not those who, at best, as Sepp Blatter observed, are not fit to handle third division clubs in their own countries.
Going for anything foreign means that as hard as we will try, we cannot find a local substitute. But where the foreign item is always the first choice, when the records obviously do not prove so, then we need to address that psychological deficiency with all the seriousness it deserves.
The argument that our local coaches do not possess certain qualifications or certificates does not hold. Are we looking for a good coach or a certificate holder? Have those with first-class certificates proved their mettle when they were given the job?
Another porous argument is that the players will not respect the local coaches. Who is saying that if you employ a local coach and pay him a good salary and give him the same authority as the foreign one, he cannot deliver? In any case, if we are not ready to respect ourselves, who will respect us?
Maybe we are just being consumed by our own inferiority complex which does not give us the self-confidence we need to take bold decisions but makes us feel inadequate and insecure doing things on our own.
Nkrumah’s dream of seeing the Ghanaian become his own master in all spheres of national life will remain a mirage if we cannot even teach ourselves how to play football.
Stevanovic will surely leave us, his personal mission satisfied. We are watching our football administrators what their next move will be.
fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
kofiakordor.blogpsot.com
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