Kevin Prince, Ghanaians salute you

Kevin Prince Boateng has done what as a writer I’d anticipated a long time ago.

How many times have this GFA seen any of the mighty football nations forcing themselves on naturalized players? The way our FA hunt for these players makes it look like Ghana lacks talent here within the nation. The moment we hear a foreign national bearing a Ghanaian name, we just rush in for him without checking their intention of accepting to come and play for us as if we lack playing materials in this country.

The reason why Brazilian football up to date still remains strong is how they do their selection to their national team. There are so many Brazilian nationals whom because they couldn’t get a chance to wear Brazilian national team jersey decided to revert to another country to play for them. You can talk of the likes of Deco of Portugal, Giovanni Dos Santos of Mexico, Kevin Kuranyi and Cacau of Germany, Amauri of Italy and more because Brazilian football do need committed and patriotic players to wear their national colours so they do nationwide selection.

But this is not so with the so called Brazilians of African football, Ghana. Our football gurus are only interested in such naturalized players because of their stomach; a local emerging Ghanaian player can hardly be able to grease their palms. If you check Ghana’s football record in global competitions, from U-17 to the senior side, how we sold our name at Barcelona 92, Atlanta 96 and currently the two FIFA World Cups the Black Stars have participated in.

It is very sad that a player like Mario Balotteli at one stage wanted to prove to the whole world that he even doesn’t know a country called Ghana simply because we approached him to naturalize and play for us.

Kevin Prince Boateng’s commitment to the national team after he got what he wanted from us in the World Cup was written on the wall for everybody to see as he demonstrated that uncommitted behavior for one of our 2012 African Nations’ Cup qualifies.

‘Even if a monkey wears a golden ring, it is and remains an ugly thing,’ the saying goes. The player Kevin Prince is non-Ghanaian, his whole features shows even his celebrations when he scores for AC Milan.

Government should even take GFA capo Kwesi Nyantakyi and Black Stars assistant coach Kwasi Appiah to task for causing financial loss to the nation when they flew all the way to ltaly to see Boateng knowing very well that the guy cannot be convinced. The most annoying thing is that immediately after telling the whole nation that Kevin would be included in the next Ghana game, the guy came out with this disheartening news of quitting international soccer.

Meanwhile, the FA also knew that Kevin is having problems with the national team’s head coach Goran Stevanovic. Ghana football is still great without Kevin and the so-called naturalized players. Kevin's incident should be a warning symptom to Ghana Football Association chiefs in relation to how they go about recruiting naturalized nationals to play for us. They should do enough research about why Ahmed Toure even wants to play for Ghana national team and not his native country Ivory Coast. They are using Ghana as a stepping stone to achieve their set targets and that must be stopped at once.

A word to the wise-----