MTN FA Cup final shows local league can be salvaged

Sometimes you wonder who writes these scripts in football. At the end of a week when the quality of Ghana’s domestic league and it’s key actors were basterdized by a man who has barely seen a single game, Kumasi Asante Kotoko, Medeama SC and the beautiful folks of Sekondi responded with a show that ticked all the right boxes and provided fantastic ideas to salvage a dull league.

The commentators in the MTN FA Cup final kept making reference to Avram Grant’s agent Saif Rubie. You could tell the emotions in the voice of Ibrahim Ridwan Asante when he said “who says there is no quality in the Ghana league.” Former Ghana international Abukari Damba said at half time that he was not sure at some point whether he was watching the English Premier League or La Liga.

On twitter where football commentary matters these days a lot too, the verdict was that this was good quality. It wasn’t just people blowing nationalistic hot air at the end of a weekend when we rose up in collective defence of the right of home based players to some attention from Ghana boss Avram Grant. It was the sort of football, in the sort of atmosphere, transmitted by the sort of television production that has made all of us junkies to some of the biggest leagues in the world.

You can’t make a bad product look good though no matter the packaging. And that is why Medeama in particular got so many people thrilled. Their collection energy was thrilling, you could almost feel it by watching. They wanted the win so bad and they worked for it with

Malik Akowuah and Eric Kwakwa were awesome in midfield and Benjamin Bature tortured Kotoko all day. For the Porcupine Warriors, Ahmed Toure was Ahmed Toure; bright early on but lacking energy as the game progressed.

If any point in the game demystified the claim that Avram Grant will find no useful material watching the Ghana league, it came with Medeama’s second goal. Bature’s assist is the sort that would have broken twitter if it has been served by a Lionel Messi or a Neymar. The speed of movement, the weight of the pass for Richard Adjei, his timing and the dink was of the highest standard and befitting any stage.

It didn’t go unnoticed. TV3 sports presenter Elloyne Amande tweeted “still in thrall of the build up to Medeama’s second goal. Mesmerized the Kotoko defence and finish was clinical. Deserving goal to win a final.”

Yet it just wasn’t the football that was thrilling. Everything about the final was of the highest standard. Maybe we are so in awe of it is evidence of how bad things have become but the organisers did a magnificent job.

And it begs the question, why don’t we this often, why can’t there be a bit more of buzz about our local league? To start with the final had a lot of things going for it, some by the brilliant thinking of the FA Cup committee. They opted for a smaller stadium which when full created a far better stadium than a half full Accra Sports Stadium would have provided. On that score many of us were wrong to criticise the choice of Sekondi.

Then there was the effort that went into the promotion of the game; the press conferences, the radio jingles, the insistence that clubs made themselves available to crank up the hype machine. Even more important was the acknowledgement that shifting the game to 5pm so it didn’t clash with the Swansea-Manchester United game would help. Sometimes there is no point in ignoring the obvious. That 5pm kick-off worked magic for attendance in Essipong but above for the volume of television audience it drew in.

You must hope that things will not change. That we will continue to tweak fixtures with television in mind and derive the most attention for our league. You must hope too that after this game, club officials won’t go back into the perpetual mode of refusing to speak to the media in the build up to games.a And you must hope someone sends the tape of that game to Avram Grant. Maybe he will be around a bit more to see what we know. Domestic football here may be suffering from organisational lapses but it doesn’t mean it is completely bare on quality.