Going places with Kofi Akpabli:Brazil blues
Against Germany in the Bochum disaster of 1993, the first half recorded a one nil lead for Ghana. During recess, something snapped among the players in the locker room. Never mind what (This is Ghana).
Fact is, it wasn’t managed well and when the game resumed our beloved Black Stars went down by 6-1! How could a team that has matched Germany boot for boot in the first half allow in six goals in the second?
The point is that much of the anguish we suffer as fans of the Black Stars is due to off the pitch happenings and the sooner we start doing something about this the better. The hearts of Ghanaian citizens are at stake and the name of the nation is being dragged in the mud.
That takes me to the other leg of our FIFA 2014 World Cup debacle. Much has already been whimpered about what might have gone wrong and I would rather not go there. Or would I?
Well, let me take one bite at the bitter cherry. Just one. And I have selected this one because listening through the litany of agonies, I haven’t heard anything on this particular score.
Our Brazil World Cup problems started only 30 seconds into our campaign—that strike by the USA. After that painful premature sting, we were never able to recover.
Yes, the team went on to show some brilliance here and there but the damage had been too early and too deep.
What is easy to gloss over is the fact that the pain of that defeat brought out the worse in those key players who started from the bench. They couldn’t get over that defeat. They couldn’t forgive themselves nor could they forgive anyone—be it coach, management official or Ghana Government.
In their psychology, our players counted on defeat in our group, realistically. But a defeat to the USA wasn’t something that Kelvin, Muntari and Essien, especially, had prepared for. So that first defeat to the USA was the time bomb that would explode in all the nasty forms we all saw.
When, of all the 190 countries in the world, we chose the backyard of our first opponent as our camp ground, I sensed something was basically wrong. Either we were damned too cock sure of ourselves or we were plain strategy-naïve.
In a drone-prone America, you bet the surveillance on our hapless players and technical team is a fat dossier Wikileak’s Julian Assange would be proud of.
One would counter that a few other countries also camped in the USA. Brilliant. But how many of those nations had USA in their group? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to camp in the backyard of your direct opponent. Indeed, Germany, which was also in our group, chose to camp in Brazil, just as 26 of the other 30 teams.
So strongly have we felt and acted about our own Brazil problems that we have not cared to consider that poor refereeing was part of our bane. In the matches against Germany and Portugal one could count several instances where the referee simply refused to whistle in our favour. Some of these incidents involved blatant battering of our players such as Andre Ayew.
There is a ‘racialised’ truth in Association Football that Africa is doing nothing about. Or maybe we have become tacit to it. The fact is that on the average, in football matches between Caucasian teams and black men, referee decisions invariably favour the light-skinned. You want to contest? Just get tapes of matches between African teams and the rest of the world.
Some of the incidents involving Cameroun and Nigeria, for instance, are so painful that I wouldn’t want to particularise. Now, can we do something about it? Of course, unless we want to let the status quo remain.
If we (and I am talking Africa) want to, CAF could commission a research group —not just tape analysts— to undertake a determination of referees decisions on matches between African teams and, yes, the rest of the world.
The idea is to get a world-wide panel of fair balanced referees to comment on each decision per match.
The objective is to establish a probability. For instance, based on the data analysed, in a match between an Africa team and others the referee is three times more likely to rule against the African team.
If this is empirically established, CAF can take the next step to find out why this is the case. This can be done with the help of stakeholders including match commissioners and FIFA referees themselves, retired or active.
The fact is that many of these officials may not have been doing this consciously. So CAF can lead this initiative based on the matches of African teams, say, in the last four world cups.
If this is well documented and published, it would improve decisions. Additionally, the need to ensure fair play, which is a FIFA creed, will be well-served. But is President Issa Hayatou thinking of that?
Well. Back to our own national palaver. Ghana’s latest world cup campaign has brought us disgrace (I honestly don’t know which is more painful, saying it or keeping it in the chest). But the two previous ones gave us glory and that is what I am about to examine. See, sports glory comes with a considerable visibility for the nation.
For tourism, any event that puts a nation in a positive light tends to increase visits to the country. And when tourists visit, they come with foreign exchange which have become scarce these days.
Thus the opportunity lost in Brazil is not the matches alone but the tourism dollar potential.
To be continued.
kofiakpabli@gmail.com