The blind side!
Like a spoilt child at a candy-store, Avram Grant, head coach of the senior national men's football team, the Black Stars, continues to act juvenile, if reports of him rejecting his bonus payment in cedis is accurate.
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To begin with, Grant is an average coach, living off the splendour of his past association with a successful English premiership team, Chelsea, during which he could not win the UEFA Champions League final.
Again, Grant was so good that he took another English premiership side, West Ham United, from windfall into pitfall, causing them relegation from the cashcow of the premiership.
He has since won nothing significant, the closest being the AFCON 2015 hosted by Equatorial Guinea. Even so, he did not win, just like he did not win the English FA Cup final while managing Portsmouth. In short, he is a loser, not a winner.
Why, then, the arrogance, the temerity, the nerve to arrogate to himself the right to remote-control his agent to issue demeaning remarks on different occasions about the Ghanaian football community, topping it himself with vulgarity on television, laughing about it, immaturely, then setting out, subsequently, to address Ghanaians, disrespectfully, about our leaders?
Why would his employers, GFA, not hit him in the pocket for a month, and require him to sign a code of conduct to be of good behaviour? If he fails to sign it, his employers must take the hardline approach of continuing to freeze his salary, until he complies.
Since Grant was hired to coach the Black Stars, why would he not stay in his lane, but step out of line to attempt to define for Ghanaians what is necessary and otherwise? Is it because he cannot coach the Black Stars to glory or because he has been exposed as not competent enough to be able to impart to impact the Black Stars to the max?
That is the crux, the mainspring of this article. The possibility exists that Ghana might suffer the casualty of not making it to the Russia 2018 FIFA World Cup finals, after making three straight appearances during the 10-year tenure of FA president, Kwesi Nyantakyi, spanning tenures of ex-presidents of Ghana, J.A. Kufuor, the late John Evans Atta Mills, and the incumbent, John Dramani Mahama.
Currently, some are so consumed by the AFCON 2017 qualifiers that, possibility of world cup qualification failure does not even register in their consciousness. Yet it is a grave danger embedded in the subconsciousness of concerned observers, some of whom have raised such awareness.
It may seem that time is on the side of Ghana, yet that is hardly the case. Whatever the current challenges, it seems safe to say Ghana can lock up a spot for the 2017 edition of the AFCON.
Still, the glaring fact that the team does not score against good opposition, in the absence of the three key, but ageing players, is of grave concern, for a number of factors, particularly Grant’s failure to groom any number of reliable tandem to step in and deliver the goods, in the eventuality of Gyan being sidelined by injury, as has been the case, even prior to the 2015 AFCON.
“If I were (FA president) Nyantakyi, I’d be looking for a coach, now,” said a superior, recently, in the wake of the storm raised by Grant’s recent provocations, the said superior expressing fear Ghana might push Grant so far to the wall that he might quit.
A few other folks fear the probability Grant might quit, without notice, right in the middle of the 2018 WC qualifiers. That may be a genuine concern that I discount, on account of the massive loss of revenue to Grant — unless the nation falls in breach — grave or benign — of the super-secret contract between the two parties.
The real danger, I submit, is that Grant is a counterfeit, not the masterpiece to qualify Ghana for the aforementioned Russia 2018 FIFA World Cup, given the recurring injuries to the aforementioned key players, without whom the team does not win. That is a fact to the blind side of the aspiration of the Ghanaian football fanatic, an issue that must be discussed and addressed, without any further delay.