Our footballers on dope?
Elsewhere in this paper is the story attributed to the veteran coach, J.E. Sarpong, in which he accuses our football stars of being hooked on drugs to enhance their performance.
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By all accounts, this is a very terrible thing for a coach to say, knowing the social implications of such a pronouncement.
Indeed, we would have dismissed it but for the fact that it was uttered by no ordinary personality but a coach of Sarpong’s stature and experience who have dealt with most of our footballers and coached virtually all our clubs in the country.
But the reason we are pushed more to pay attention to the coach, popularly called Shappiro, is the message which desperately seems to be appealing to his fellow coaches and the football authorities to do something radical to stem the tide.
In what sounded like an evangelising mission, Coach Sarpong lamented the incidence of drugs shortening the careers of footballers, more so when, throughout his coaching life, he claimed, he had never heard of any talk of an anti-doping system by our football authorities to check the apparent menace (see page 12).
“Those at the helm of affairs must take players’ health seriously to help their development” was Coach Sarpong’s crying appeal.
But we wonder what he did himself to dissuade some of those players from the act when he was in the frontline of coaching and whether he is not just playing the ostrich.
However, the concern being expressed now is what is crucial and which must be the wake-up call for the Ghana Football Association and club administrators to begin to institute the anti-doping system in our football if they have not already started that.
It will be a serious indictment on our football if it is the case that there is no such thing as an anti-doping system or random drug test of our players, as is the case or expected to be the case in all jurisdictions.
But if we are to believe Coach Sarpong, this is not happening in our football, as he minced no words in what must be a revelation, that: “The players use the drugs, especially marijuana, to play matches and nobody will check them, so they become addictive to it and, sooner than later, they get weak.”
We think somebody or our football authorities must call Coach Sarpong to help if there should be a crusade to cleanse our football of the drug addicts and save the future of our young footballers.
We are in total admiration of Shappiro for daring to voice out what may have been hidden all this while, to the detriment of our football at all levels.