Of Afterthoughts, Confidence and our National Coach

I have no personal agenda against Kwesi Appiah. In fact, I would be most pleased if he succeeded and proved all of us sceptics wrong. After all, would it not be great if Ghana won the 2013 African Cup and not only qualified for, but made a good impression at the World Cup with a competent local coach at the helm. But the more I think of this appointment, the more unanswered questions I seem to come up with.

Why was the appointment of Kwesi Appiah merely an afterthought? When he was given an unprecedented four year stint as an Assistant Coach of the Black Stars, one would have thought, that it was an attempt to give him the necessary exposure to prepare him to pick up the mantle one day.

So, many of us would have been pleased if the GFA had boldly come out immediately after the exit of Stevanovic and declared, that Kwesi Appiah was their man; that he had been prepared over a four year period during which he had attended several courses in management and boosting self confidence and excelled; that he had had several attachments to clubs abroad for even more exposure and that his personal qualities had endeared him to the playing body who were all in favour of his appointment. Who would have argued with that?

Instead, with just two months to go to the World Cup, we have appointed a guy who now has to go to school to learn to be confident and hoping, as Captain Stephen Appiah put it, that because the players respected and liked him, they would be prepared to die on the pitch for him. I am sorry Capito, this idea that footballers play for their manager is only a myth, especially at the national level. We all saw the friendly interaction between Diego Maradona and his Argentinean stars at the last world cup and their performance despite having arguably the best footballer of all time in the side.

Footballers are single-minded professionals who think of their carriers first and foremost. They think first of what playing for the national side will do for their carriers and then, if they are going to “die” at all, it is for the red, gold, green and the Black Star. Not for Kwesi Appiah because he happens to be a nice guy.

So, if the GFA trusted Kwesi Appiah so much, why was he appointed only after attempts to sign Marcel Desailly had failed? And why Marcel Desailly? This is a gentleman who, despite playing at the very top, has not had any experience whatsoever in coaching. In fact, in terms of coaching experience, Kwesi Appiah is far ahead of him. The GFA knew, in their heart of hearts, that Marcel had the requisite charisma, authority, aura and self-confidence to lead a team of top class professionals to the World Cup. These are all qualities that our poor Kwesi is now having to go to school for.

Bur Marcel is nobody’s fool. He was aware of his own limitations and part of the reason he asked for the salary he did was to enable him bring on board, top class assistants like Ray Wilkins to take care of the technical side of the job. Marcel would have wanted total control and insisted on things being done his way. In fact, would the GFA be organising confidence-boosting courses for our head coach if Marcel had got the job? That is the difference.

Still, why did we have to go for Marcel Desailly in the first place? Nothing seems to add up to me. Why not Osei Kuffuor? He has not shown interest in the post but remember, we were head-hunting. Kuffuor does not lack confidence or charisma or authority – he succeeded in getting two former presidents to attend his testimonial match! He has similar club experience as Marcel and he played in the World Cup. But in addition, while Marcel was pretending to be a Frenchman, Kuffuor was coming home to play in Somalia and Eritrea. Something is not right here.

We all want our coaches to be given all the support they need. But the kind of support we were expecting to hear about were for instance, allowing the coach a free hand to select his players without official interference; aggressively and efficiently pursuing FIFA for nationality switches of Emmanuel Frimpong and other Ghanaians who want to play for us; making every effort to get Prince Boateng and Asamoah Gyan to change their minds and return to the fold; encouraging the coach to sign the best assistants he could find not only in Ghana, but across the rest of Africa if need be; paying for him to tour the local leagues and the European leagues regularly to monitor our players; and making it possible for the coach to meet our best local talents every now and again for bonding and coaching sessions.

We need our national manager to be in charge, to plan his own agenda, to radiate confidence and to inspire the whole nation. We are talking here of Ghana, where football is all but a religion and means so much to so many of our people. What we do not need is Kwesi Nyantakyi coming out with HIS programme for improving our national coach’s personality, including courses to boost his confidence, two months to the World Cup. It is an indictment on the coaching structures in the national team, the quality of foreign coaches hitherto employed, the competence of the GFA and indeed, an embarrassment to the poor Kwesi Appiah caught in the middle of all this who, I believe, needs an apology from the GFA.

Papa Appiah

Lexeve1@yahoo.co.uk

Papaappiah.blogspot.com