Elizabeth Ohene: A football fan no more
I used to be a keen football fan. I was a regular on Sundays at the stadium in Accra to watch football matches and would even make a trip with friends to watch a match in Kumasi.
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Those days the drive to Kumasi could be done in two and a half hours and we could leave Accra late morning, watch a match and drive back to Accra without any drama.
A love affair
And then one of my earlier bosses at Graphic thought he was punishing me when he sent me to the Sports department and it turned out to be a consummation of the love affair I had with sport without being a player of any sports. I read avidly everything I could find on sports in general, especially football, athletics and tennis and I followed school, club, national and international sporting competitions with an enthusiasm that surprised many. I wrote about sports and I reported on football matches.
Football drama
I was first introduced to the drama of the football World Cup back in 1978 when I watched the matches being played in Argentina on television in Senegal. I am not quite sure now if it was the football so much as the satellite facilities in Senegal that so enchanted me.
From then onwards I had to watch all football World Cup matches on television and I indulged myself in the worldwide frenzy that accompanied the competition.
One of the most exhilarating times of my life was the three-week period I spent in Germany at the 2006 World Cup. The fact that it was the first time Ghana made an appearance at the World Cup probably had something to do with it and the unexpected brilliant performance of our team certainly added spice to it all.
Up until then, my experience of the World Cup had been strictly on the television but after that it became personal. It became important for me where the competition was held because I now held the faint hope that I might go and watch the World Cup in person rather than on television.
I remember how glad I was when South Africa won the right to stage the 2010 competition. I was in the stadium in Soweto for the finals of the South Africa 2010 World Cup and felt on top of the world even though none of the teams I was supporting had made it to the finals.
I did not try to go to Brazil in 2014 but I was glad that country had been given the opportunity to stage the competition.I followed the Black Stars’ doomed campaign in Brazil. I watched in awe as Ghana became the butt of jokes as we carried dollars in a plane to try and stop a revolt of the players.
Ending a love affair
I can’t put my finger on the exact moment, and I am not quite sure what did it, but since then my love affair with football has ended.I no longer watch or follow football as avidly as I used to. I do not even read football match reports and I no longer know the names of obscure but brilliant players in the Dutch league.
Admittedly I had stopped going to football matches long ago and now I do not even watch football on television either. I do not know anything about our local league and do not know the names of any of the players.
I did not watch a single match of the Copa Americana competition and could not cheer Chile’s historic win of the Cup. I did not watch any of the matches in the women’s football World Cup either. Even the snatches of the excitable commentaries on the matches that I heard during the news on the radio did not tempt me to go and watch the games on television.
I am now reduced to following only football politics, even though I suspect I still follow the fortunes of our national team and I have an alert on Asamoah Gyan, the Captain of the Black Stars.
Football politics
After the Brazil fiasco, I took no interest in the sittings of the Dzamefe Commission of Enquiry, which is what the President of the Republic instituted to try and find out what went wrong in Brazil. The report of the commission and the government white paper on it have done nothing to bring back my interest in football.
I have been following the pathetic attempts to put the blame on everybody else but the officials who were in charge. I have been near and around football long enough to know and even accept that it is a game that seems to attract a lot of dodgy people and it is not even unlikely that part of the attraction of the game comes from the intrigues that surround it.
Then I remind myself that compared to what is happening on the global scale with football, ours is a puny and sad drama. I have watched with the rest of the world as officials of the once almighty FIFA were picked up and carted away like everyday criminals.
I cannot pretend to fully understand the drama that has been unfolding in the past few weeks. But it seems if one broke down the problem into sizes that can be easily understood, then it all comes down to countries paying bribes to FIFA officials so they can be given the right to stage the World Cup tournament.
I have been asking myself if I would have enjoyed South Africa 2010 any less if I had known that South Africa had allegedly given $10 million of FIFA money that should have come to them to help defray the costs of hosting to some officials to gain the staging rights. I wonder if Germany also had to make some dodgy arrangement to get the rights to the 2006 tournament and would I have enjoyed it any less if I had known.
I wonder if my continuing disgust with the fiasco in Brazil is because there is no redeeming factor. What if the Black Stars had defeated Portugal in that last group match and miraculously qualified to the knockout stages? Would it have been okay for the authorities to display such incompetence and subject all of us to worldwide ridicule? I doubt it and it no longer matters anyway, I no longer count myself among football fans.
Writer’s email: abutia@yahoo.com.gh