Bias officiating cost Ghana's World Cup qualification during my tenure- Alhaji Jawula

Former Ghana Football Association Chairman, Lepowura Alhaji MND Jawula has blamed bias officiating as a cause of the Black Stars’ failure to qualify for the FIFA World Cup during his tenure.

Jawula led the GFA from 1997 to 2001 and in that spell, he failed to lead Ghana to the World Cup despite an array of star names available on the football scene.

Ghana narrowly missed out on qualification to the 1998 FIFA World Cup under his tenure and according to him; refereeing decisions in their crucial game against Morocco (who eventually made it) denied the Black Stars the chance to play at Football’s biggest showpiece.

Reminiscing on his time as boss of the GFA, Jawula believes that but for strange refereeing decisions, Ghana would have made it to the Mundial.

“It was a major problem for everybody in Ghana because we had the quality of players,” he told the Beyond The Pitch Show on GTV Sports+.

“That was the days of Abedi Pele, Tony Yeboah, C.K Akonnor, Osei Kuffour and all those players…but for some reason we just could not qualify.

“Those countries that used to qualify against us, talking about Morocco and the rest, and anytime that we had to play hem to qualify, it was always a do-and-die, very difficult

“What I thought is we didn’t get to the world cup because of officiating.

“There was this particular occasion that we went to Morocco, we needed a certain goal to score to qualify.

“Just when Abedi Pele had dribbled the last person and was about to score, the referee blew the whistle and said offside. We still don’t know where the offside came from. And that was it,” he concluded.

Ghana subsequently qualified for the FIFA World Cup for the first time in 2006 under the leadership of Kwasi Nyantakyi.

The GFA boss also led the Black Stars to back to back qualification in 2010 ad 2014.