When players play God

Like a bad dream that has to be forgotten in a hurry, Ghanaians have to find a way of dealing with the pain of the ill-fated Brazil 2014 campaign.

In a tournament that almost everything about our participation went awry, how long the dreadful memories will linger on, or how we will successfully put them behind us, depend on the kind of dispassionate analyses we make of the disastrous campaign.

Germany 2006 wasn’t a perfect campaign, but because the whole world hailed the Black Stars as the most attractive African side at the tournament, that got into our heads to make us forget the urgency of a review. 

South Africa 2010 was a mind-blowing revelation of Ghana football on the global stage, and so once again, the plaudits got the better of us, making us relegate the much-needed exercise of post-mortem to the background. 

The price we were to pay for that was only a matter of time.

Over and over again, we have ignored the basic lesson that success in football was not just about having a collection of talents who could mesmerise their opponents on the pitch. In the process, a vital ingredient such as player discipline in team building was overlooked.

What happened in the camp of the Black Stars in Brazil, culminating in the expulsion of two senior players – Sulley Muntari and Kevin-Prince Boateng – signified a time-bomb whose menacing ticking away meant something else to some people. In other words, our chickens had come home to roost.

Muntari is one player who has been a constant source of headache to successive managements of the national team. This is not the first time he is being expelled from the team. He’s been shown the exit a number of times for gross indiscipline, but on each occasion, he found his way back to the team thanks to the intervention of some highly-placed personalities.

Naturally he had come to believe that his place in the team was guaranteed till kingdom come. The consequence was for him to play God and fly in the face of decency.

In the case of Boateng, I wonder if anyone can blame him for his behaviour. Fact is, he had an easy entry into the team at a time when other players who played a big role in the Stars’ qualification for South Africa 2010 had been ignored. 

After giving him a huge platform such as the World Cup to relaunch his floundering career, he had the impudence to tell the whole country that his professional career in Europe wouldn’t make it possible to play for the national team again. 

In private, he was reported to have confided in people about the unacceptable standard of the pitches in Ghana.

No amount of persuasion by the FA and well-meaning Ghanaians to get the Schalke player to rescind his decision elicited any positive response from him. 

He was so full of himself that when coach Kwasi Appiah travelled all the way to Italy to prevail on him to have a change of mind, Boateng would neither meet him nor pick his calls.

He finally returned to the Squad, but it was when the Stars had qualified for Brazil 2014. Even so it was on condition that he would be allowed to bring his own physiotherapist to camp, with the FA taking care of his salary.

Boateng just played for a few minutes in the second leg of the Ghana-Egypt play-off in Cairo to cement his place in the team and later collected a $100,000.00 appearance fee in Brazil.

I’ve tried in vain to understand why a country like Ghana, bursting at the seams with talents at any given time, should allow itself to be dictated to by one player, regardless of his stature. As a country we belittled ourselves before Boateng.

Some of the so-called senior players of the Stars shouldn’t have travelled to Brazil in the name of going to represent Ghana. We would have been better off without them.

It’s about time we grew out of the negative practice of making some players feel that they are so important the state owes them everything from big appearance fees to obeisance to hero worshipping all the time.

I have always yearned for the day when our coaches can act decisively like France ’98 coach Aime Jacques when he came face to face with the huge ego problem of Eric Cantona and David Ginola. 

He went to ‘war’ without two of the finest at the time and yet won the World Cup. Could he have made a more powerful statement?

One can only hope that we’ve learnt the necessary lessons from the Brazil debacle.