Come Again “Coach” Nyantakyi

My wife cares little about football. She had never watched a full football match in her life till we all managed to persuade her to attend the Ghana – Latvia match at Milton Keynes before the last World Cup. Even then, it was sold to her as an interesting family outing and an opportunity to meet old friends. As it turned out, she enjoyed the occasion so much, that she has since watched all Black Star matches on television. She still struggles with the rules though.

Recently, I was caught up at work during an important Black Stars match and my wife happened to be alone at home watching the game. Every now and again I would escape to a corner and make a quick call to her to find out what was going on. It was an experience I have sworn never to repeat, for she nearly provoked a heart attack in me. One conversation went as follows;

“How is it Dear?”

“Not good” she said

“What do you mean? Not good? What is the score?”

“Ghana has only 45% possession”

“I know Dear” I said patronizingly “but what is the score!!”

“No score but oh, they have a penalty!!” she said

“Oh my God!” I exclaimed

“Or is it? They are taking it from near the flag..........”

That is the level of my wife’s football knowledge but when I mentioned yesterday that Kwesi Appiah was the new Black Stars coach, she asked whether it was the gentleman always hiding in the background. When I answered in the affirmative, she questioned where the confidence would come from to manage the players.

Successful football managers have different backgrounds and different strengths and weaknesses. Many of the very top football managers, like Mourinho and Arsene Wenger have hardly played football at all. The great Martin O’Neill of Sunderland never does any coaching. The current successful Southampton manager was actually a physiotherapist in another club where he was asked to take temporal charge of the team in a crisis. The rest is history. It is difficult to predict who is going to be a good manager and who is going to fail. However, a common denominator runs through all these guys. They have loads of self confidence.

A top football manager must not only be confident but must be seen to be so. Or they must learn to act confident. After all, when the chips are down in the heat of battle, who do the players look up to for inspiration and confidence? It’s the manager. A good manager has the ability to inspire and motivate players to perform above their natural abilities and they cannot do that if they are not seen to be confident themselves.

The great Brian Clough was actually not an exceptional coach at all. He relied for most of his professional success on the technical ability of his long time partner Peter Taylor. What Brian Clough had was the aura, charisma and loads of confidence. He was once asked how he dealt with players who did not agree with some of his decisions. He said, that he would sit down with them in his office, have a long chat, and finally, they would both agree, that he had been right in the first place! Call that what you will, confidence, arrogance? It made him one of the best managers ever in the world.

We have all had our reservations about Kwesi Appiah’s confidence or lack of, except that, once he had been appointed, we hoped that our perception of him was wrong and that he was actually one of those rare breed who effectively disguise their confidence but were able to call on it in times of crisis. After all, this is a guy who has been captain of both Asante Kotoko and the Black Stars. The last we were expecting was for the country’s top football administrator to make our perceptions and reservations official by suggesting courses to boost the manager’s confidence.

Has Kwesi Appiah asked for any such training? If he has, then what business has he accepting the Black Stars job? This is a gentleman who has been Black Stars Assistant Coach for four years, playing a couple of matches every three months or so. What was he doing in that period? Why did he not use some of his bonus to arrange self-improvement courses and upgrade his CV?

We are two months away from our World Cup campaign where we hope to compete against the best in the world. In fact, we have so little time, that we could not advertise the Black Stars job. We had to headhunt. And all we could come up with is a coach who now has to go to school to be taught how to be manager and how to be confident. How is he going to deal with our overpaid, overfed professionals playing in the top leagues in the world and used to the best managers. Players often play well for managers they like, but that can only take us so far. When times are rough, we need a confident, competent manager to lift them up.

We all have to learn throughout our lives and even top coaches still attend workshops and courses to update their knowledge and I expect Kwesi Appiah to do the same. What I was not expecting was for Kwesi Nyantakyi to lay out the syllabus and recipe for making him a better coach and make him confident, when this could have been done long ago, thus making official and entrenching general perceptions about the guy. From the very beginning, Kwesi Appiah has been put on the back foot. He is good but not that good, the GFA is saying. We need to help you with courses. We don’t have to pay you that well and you have to take instructions from us. How is the guy expected to succeed?

Was it not only recently that Mr Nyantakyi was lambasting members of the press, arrogantly questioning their educational background and wondering why people with no law degrees dared question him about the coach’s contract? What makes him think, that as a lawyer, he knows the recipe and syllabus for making a good coach from an inexperienced guy and that his methods are so effective that he is going to produce a world class coach in two months to compete with the best in the world? This appointment will bear fruit, but I am afraid, judging from the GFAs utterances, that it will only be in the pockets of our football administrators.

Papa Appiah

Lexeve1@yahoo.co.uk

PapaAppiah.blogspot.com