Let’s revive colts football

It is said that any entity that fails to plan plans to fail. Perhaps the state of our sports can be attributed to our failure to plan in order to maintain our standards or improve upon them.

It appears there is no deliberate and sustained agenda to revive Ghana sports from the depth it has sunk for some years now.

Many years ago, community sports, inter-school games and colts soccer were common on our sports agenda. Even small communities in our countryside had community parks, while schools in towns and villages came together to form zonal associations in order to compete among themselves.

When those schools engaged in sports competitions, the towns erupted into big extravaganza, with both young and old showing their support for the teams.

Colts teams in the cities were a delight to watch and they produced players for even the senior national team. The maestro, Abedi Pele, was a product of the colt’s soccer system.

Again, few decades ago, Ghana’s Academicals engaged their Nigerian counterparts in an annual fiesta that was highly competitive and watched by a very large crowd.

Private schools in Accra and other cities had their own competitions as well, the contests being keenly contested and public participation very high.

It is difficult to assign immediate reasons for the lack of interest in the development of sports from the grass roots to the national level, but we can say that this attitude will not help us get back to the glorious days of Ghana football when almost all national teams trembled at the mere mention of the Black Stars.

We are not oblivious to the fact that there are no minnows in soccer or sports on the continent or in the world. Small nations prepare well and some of them are making waves on the international scene, while we still believe that we can continue to ride on our past glory.

When the Minister designate for Youth and Sports, Mr Isaac Kwame Asiamah, appeared before the Appointments Committee of Parliament yesterday, he gave indications as to how the NPP government intended to revive Ghana sports.

From where we are presently, it is going to be a Herculean task, but it can be done.

First of all, we must resource the Ghana Education Service adequately to revive school sports from the primary to the tertiary level.

We know our economy has constraints, but we must still find some resources to revive sports, as it is a well-known fact that any investment in sports has a ripple effect on the economy.

Football, for instance, has become big business across the globe, with players earning fortunes with their endeavours. The budgets of some English Premier League clubs are bigger than those of some states in Africa.

This tells you that good investments in sports and their proper management can yield good dividends.

The Daily Graphic believes that to be able to revive sports, there must be a change in the mindset of those who administer the sector. The present practice where the administrators of sports fail to coach, mentor and nurture talents but only assemble people who have made the name for competitive tournaments is not helping our cause.

We plead with the government to endeavour to find the resources to invest in sports to return the Black Stars and the other national teams to winning ways.

We urge the citizens to step up their activism in the campaign to weed out corruption from sports, so that the taxpayer will have value for money.