Feature: If I were Ghana coach Avram Grant

Israeli-born Ghana Black Stars’ Coach Avram Grant told it like it is when he let it be known to his Ghanaian critics that they would be better off concentrating on having the Black Stars’ players train hard and deliver high-quality games to their fans and well-wishers than worry themselves silly about how often he traveled outside the country to mind his other obligations and commitments (See “Concentrate on Football, Not the Bull…t – Grant Tells Ghanaians” TV3Network.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/25/16).

As a nation and a pointlessly talkative people, Ghanaians ought to thank their stars that a highly sophisticated and urbane international soccer maestro like Mr. Grant would consent to needlessly endure our decidedly primitive culture of Dumsor and the sort of abject filth into which the Mahama government has plunged our once globally renowned “travel-and-see” country. If the officials of our Sports Ministry wanted to hire a sedentary or field-bound coach, nothing prevented them from scouting and contracting for one. I am quite sure that Mr. Kwasi Nyantakyi and his men at the Ghana Football Association (GFA) did not work out the details of how often Coach Grant would be expected to fly out of the country to attend to his personal obligations and other important commitments.

And so why all this fuss about Mr. Grant’s staying off state side more frequently than expected, and also the charge that the coach has been monitoring most of the activities of the stars by remote control? It clearly appears that the man has sized up the talents that he has been contracted to deal with and the amount of face-time he needs to invest in these players, quite a remarkable number of the most prominent and best paid of whom prefer to routinely indulge in unnecessary pleasures and sheer mischief than conduct themselves like the first-rate professionals that they direly need to become, if our national team is to inch delectably closer to clinching the World Cup in the offing.

Coach Grant clearly envisages the Black Stars’ lifting of global soccer’s most highly prized trophy as a certain possibility in the not-so-distant future, even as a remarkable number of our most talented players continue to show themselves to woefully lack the requisite discipline for the sport. Our sports managers across the various sub-disciplines also need to wise up and discipline themselves and stop unsavorily scheming constantly to cut corners and line up their pockets at the expense of our players and the long-term development and well-being of the sport. The politics of player envy that caused the former Sports Minister to want to halve up the bonuses paid victorious players per match – I hear the new Sports Minister is up to the same mischief - is the kind of Satanic thinking that ought to be permanently banished from the minds of our sports administrators.

It is all right to make bragging capital out of the enviable record of the Stars’ having appeared for the seventh consecutive time at the AFCON tournaments, but it would be even more enviable if the Ghana Football Association executives foregrounded player and managerial discipline to ensure that we won more championship titles than any other nation on the continent. This perennially pathological premature screaming for victory is what I have dubbed Ghana’s Coitus-Interruptus Fit with soccer championships.

In short, let’s leave Coach Grant alone to do the best that he can do for our national team with the caliber of players he has had to contend with. Needless to say, if we trusted our own managerial talents, to begin with, we wouldn’t have literally paid an arm and a leg for the services of a foreign coach. Or better yet, we wouldn’t have sent our own Coach Kwasi Appiah packing, bag and baggage, for The Sudan, where he appears to be doing remarkable wonders in Khartoum with the children and grandchildren of Mo Ibrahim.