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The first few months of Burkhard Ziese’s return to the Black Stars was met with chaos. He was getting into unnecessary wrangling with members close to the team, he was in many ways outdated and heavily relied on the romance of his previous performance when he held the team from 1990 to 1992. He ditched then young goalkeepers; James Nanor, Sammy Adjei and Abubakari Kankani who had represented Ghana at the Cup of Nations a year earlier for his trusted pair of hands in Edward Ansah who was way past his prime and had become a goalkeeper’s trainer at the time.
Burkhard had left the job in 1992 unceremoniously after a brief misapprehension with the then Football Association. 11 years on, he had returned to his old stomping ground supposedly with a better mindset – ready to whip Ghana back into shape and to the top of African football again. That did not go according to plan.
For a country such as Ghana, qualifying for tournaments is a wacky case. Get through it easily and it is treated as a no brainer – a birthright, as if it was cast in stone. Grapple through it and the general sense is, with good reason, that is you can’t beat the relatively easier sides in front of you, how then can you perform against the top sides? It is a matter of seriousness for Ghanaians. What Burkhard Ziese did in June 2003 was to lose to Rwanda – one of the worst ranked sides in the world at the time. A solitary goal from Jimmy Gatete downed Ghana and meant that the Black Stars would not be in Tunisia in 2004; 14 years after making it back to Africa’s top stage.
The Burkhard Ziese fiasco was met with huge uproar but did we learn?
Fast forward, 2021 (18 years after that horror show), the Ghana Football Association unveiled another Black Stars coach in Milovan Rajevac. Rajevac was the man who got Ghana to the pinnacle of World Football. In his first stint, he did all the right things. Took Ghana to the 2010 final of the Africa Cup of Nations – the first time since 1992 and took the world by storm when they played at the World Cup in South Africa.
The FA president was in high spirits at the unveiling. “We have found our man. We are very grateful that he agreed to come. Even though the terms were not what he would expect, but one thing he says is that he feels he has unfinished business here with Ghana and that is the biggest motivation for him and his team. He has done it. He knows Ghana. He knows our culture. He knows are players. He knows our attitude. He knows our food. For which reason we firmly believe that we have the right man in place.” He bragged. These remarks were met with faces drawn with dubitation, while others looked comfortable with the choice.
But in clear terms, Milovan Rajevac’s appointment was nothing but a quick fix. There was no plan. No one bothered about what the playing style would be, no one cared about how the Black Stars were going to shape up going into a tournament like the Africa Cup of Nations. Let us be quite clear about this. There is a fundamental problem in Ghana Football. There are no agreed priorities of Ghana Football. The Football Association has priorities, the government has priorities and even the playing body has priorities. The unspoken priority is that we should have a plan as a football nation and that is what successive coaches have tried to implement. It is shameful that for over how many years of playing football, there is none to boast of. Every coach comes in and implements something – something that works for 1 or 2 years and after the results go stale, we ditch them and find another.
In Rajevac’s defense though, he started well. Ghana were a point behind South Africa in the World Cup qualifying group but he managed to usurp them with 3 wins and a draw in 4 games to put us in contention for the playoffs in March.
There is nothing really as fickle as football – a couple of not great performances and the world is against you and then a couple of good performances and it is like you are the best thing ever when the truth is that you are somewhere in the middle. It is not something we all do very well. It is very black and white with no gray areas. That is football. It is harsh. It is fast-paced and fans move on quickly from recent success. Milovan may have been that man 2 months ago for qualifying us to the playoffs of the World Cup but after overseeing the country’s worst ever AFCON campaign, he has lost that reverence in the eyes of many.
The 2021 Africa Cup of Nations was shambolic. A crying shame to anything Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana stands for. Millovan’s excuses may not cut it now because he was optimistic going into the tournament. The excuses now make his initial comments of accepting the underdog tag and how good it is for Ghana very laughable. After the draw against Gabon, he mentioned that one of the reasons for his non-performance at this tournament was because he did not have Asamoah Gyan. In actual fact, Ghana’s record scorer isn’t who we necessarily needed in Cameroon. Gyan scored three goals enroute to the Black Stars reaching the final in 2010 – the same number of goals Ghana scored and exited in the group stage. What the Serb has failed to address is that in that 2010 team, he had a great goalkeeper who had been doing it for years and a solid defense that had played together for a while. In Milovan’s short time here, the defensive pairing has changed in almost every other game. How do they muster confidence in games? Defenses do not just get durable and reliable overnight. A lot of work goes into it and if anyone should know, it should be the man who has long been a proponent of defensive football.
The blame has lazily been placed at the doorsteps of the Ayew brothers but are they to be singled out for pillorying in a team that has so much promise and yet under delivers? Are they really the only players holding us back? Certainly not. The management of the national team careers matters more to this cause of getting back on top than anything else. Andre may not be as sharp as he used to be, but he has consistently given his all for this country in goals and assists. It will be incredibly unthinkable to just show him the exit at this point. If Andre were manager, would he start Andre and play him for 90minutes? On the flipside, he has overseen Ghana’s worst ever Africa Cup of Nations campaign and will have to answer some questions about his team’s discipline on the pitch.
The handling of Kudus Mohammed’s injury issue, the inclusion of Mubarak Wakaso knowing he wasn’t fit and adding a handful of local players to shut fans of the Ghana Premier League up only to have them watching from the stands is not the way to go.
Milo’s disaster of a tournament just mirrors Burkhard Ziese of 2003. It also ties in with the return of Kwesi Appiah and how sour that went too. Doom and gloom have characterized second-comings in this country. The earlier we learn, the better it will be for our football.
As of now, we are only sleepwalking into an abyss.
By Yaw Ofosu Larbi|3Sports|Ghana
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