Solving goal-scoring problems in Ghana: Former Kotoko star advocates special coaching for strikers

A former Kumasi Asante Kotoko and AshantiGold defender, Eric Donkor, has advocated for specialised coaching for strikers to help solve the recent goal drought in the Ghanaian League.

Donkor said the recent goal-scoring challenge facing Ghanaian clubs could easily be solved if they assign coaches for their strikers.

A few weeks ago, Accra Hearts of Oak’s Head Coach, Martinus Koopman, while lamenting his club’s poor scoring rate in the competition, stated that it was symptomatic of a league-wide scoring problem which also reflected badly on the national teams.

While Donkor, who also holds a Licence D Coaching certificate and is a football administrator, agreed with the Hearts coach, he said the situation had snowballed into a national problem which deserved urgent attention because it had also affected the performance of the national team, Black Stars.

He advocated that the problem be addressed technically with the use of specialised coaching for strikers in the same way that goalkeepers were given specialised coaching.

“Just as we have goalkeepers’ coaches around who only work on goalkeeping we need to have goal-scoring coaches as well. Strikers’ coaches I mean,” he said while contributing to the Graphic Sports X Spaces Dialogue on the topic: “Finding Solutions to Ghana’s Goal Scoring Problems”.

Donkor, currently the CEO of Division Two side, Koforidua Suhyen Sporting Club, mentioned Manchester United as a typical example of a club that had appointed South Africa striker and coach, Benni McCarthy, as the club’s strikers’ trainer, whose presence in the club’s coaching department had yielded the needed results.

“It is pure practice, and if you don’t practice it, you will not get it right. We need to practise it,” he said.

On the way forward, he suggested the involvement of retired legends with a solid record in goalscoring to mentor some of the younger players to perfect the art of scoring.

“We have a lot of these legends who have played for the national teams, who have scored so many goals for the national teams and their clubs so they need to impact that knowledge to the new generation,” he said.

Assistant Coach of Dreams FC, Winfred Dormon, who also contributed to the topic, called for the establishment of game models, quality coaching, as well as creativity in teams to help solve the goal-scoring problems which had plagued the clubs.

He bemoaned the practice where the management of Ghanaian clubs recruited and registered players before employing the services of a coach.

“It is a big issue because the lifeblood of football is goals and nothing more. Unfortunately, the trend that we are seeing so far has not been good enough,” Coach Dormon said.

“Unfortunately, most of the Ghanaian clubs don’t have what we call a playing model or a game model. In the same vein, they don’t sign coaches who share the same game model and that affects recruitment and, therefore, coaches come when management has already recruited and registered the players for them,” he added.