Don’t start Ghana Premier League in October - Yahaya Mohammed

Aduana Stars striker, Yahaya Mohammed has appealed to the leadership of the Ghana Football Association consider starting next football season in November or December this year.

On Sunday, September, 20, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in a state broadcast on the measures taken against the Coronavirus pandemic lifted the ban on contact sports and announced that the Ghana Premier League and the Division One League for the 2020/21 season will start on Friday, October, 30.

Several concerns have been raised by coaches and players about the date for the #OperationRestart as they believe that the players will need about a month to prepare before they will be in a good shape for football.

The latest to have added his voice to the subject is Yahaya Mohammed of Aduana Stars who believes that starting the league in October will not be ideal.

“The timing is very close because we have been home for a very long time. We usually use 30 days for pre-season. We are expected to train for three weeks and use the last week to play friendlies.”

“It’s going to be very difficult, so if the GFA boss is hearing me they can push the start of the league to the middle of November so that we can use the whole of October for preparations," Yahaya Mohammed told Kumasi FM in an interview.

To him, the league should start in November as no team in the league has prepared adequately for a new season.

"It is impossible to start the league in October from my point of view. The government said go ahead, you can start but we cannot start in October."

”There’s no team that can tell you that it has started preparation. We need a minimum of four to six weeks for the clubs, they need to purchase new players and start pre-season training which cannot be done in three weeks.

“Practically, we give ourselves four to six weeks from the time we’ve been asked to start so the earliest we might start in November,” he concluded.