Andre Ayew vs. Jordan Ayew: The verdict

It isn’t hard to guess that Ghanaians had awaited the moment for a long time, no one more so than the Maestro himself, Abedi Ayew Pele.

Aston Villa hosted Swansea at Villa Park on Saturday in the Premier League, as Andre Ayew and Jordan Ayew finally went head to head on English soil. The match ended 2-1 in favour of the away side.

This wasn’t the first encounter between Jordan and Andre on a football field.

Earlier in May, the siblings had produced one of the most memorable mutual nights of their careers when they scored three of six goals in a Ligue 1 encounter between Olympique de Marseille and FC Lorient. That night in May, Jordan, playing for Lorient, scored twice while Andre scored once for Marseille as Les Merlus recorded a surprising 4-2 victory at the Velodrome.

After that spectacle, there was every reason to expect something special on Saturday.

On Saturday, the world was served up a re-enactment of that moment, albeit not quite with such spectacular contributions from the sons of Abedi Pele.

Coming into the game, Andre had notched four goals in nine matches, and won both the Premier League and the Swansea City Player of the Month of August.

Jordan, by contrast, has struggled to assert himself in the EPL and find a place in Tim Sherwood’s starting lineup. Heading into Saturday’s clash, he was yet to find the net for the Villains, and his relief was palpable when he finally broke his duck to open the scoring for the Birmingham strugglers.

With a goal, five shots, and a pass-accuracy percentage of 88, Jordan certainly accounted himself quite well. Even beyond the pure statistics, Jordan was transformed; it was evident that Jordan’s confidence had soared. His performance wasn’t perfect—and he couldn’t help Villa to the victory—but it was an encouraging showing and was perhaps the first tangible piece of evidence that he will succeed in England.

Andre, on the other hand, returned to scoring form, having previously found the net three times in his opening four games. His form has dipped recently, according to the likes of Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher, simply because he had not scored as many in his past five games.

Andre had, in fact, scored just once over the period, and it was perhaps fair that he had not matched up to the heady showings of August.

However, he was arguably Swansea’s outstanding individual on Saturday, and even when he’s not finding the net, he complements those around him and gets the best out of his teammates.

In the streets of Accra, in pubs, at commercial match viewing centres, you can certainly hear the arguments go on and on, “Who is the better brother?”

The jury is still out after Saturday’s match, as Jordan kept the flame of debate alive, but the Ayews will care little.

In their minds, they will believe they took the opportunity to showcase themselves to the world once again; maybe it was never the case of who is the better brother at all, even if, on this occasion, Andre had the last laugh!