By Bernard Asubonteng
“Familiarity”, they say,” breeds contempt.” In almost similar context, the Biblical Jesus underscores this age-old axiom when he laments that “Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown” (Luke 4:24). In other words, when people, friends, see and interact with you on daily basis; they become too familiar with you, and the likely result is that often they tend to take you or everything you say for granted. This “familiarity phenomenon” is the proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging around the neck of Akwasi Appiah or any potential local coach for the national soccer team the Black Stars.
In an environment like Africa that has been conditioned, by an accident of history, to regard every imported commodity as the best, it is never surprising, unfortunately, that soccer-rich nation such as Ghana can’t find or settled on the confident notion that some of its local coaches are as good as many of their expatriate counterparts. Undoubtedly, Coach Akwasi Appiah is competent enough to handle the Black Stars again. But in addition to the already outlined episode, subconscious or conscious inferiority impulses among many Africans/Ghanaians account for the contemptuous lenses through which most of the soccer officials look at one of their own trainers as opposed to foreign coaches.
Ghana has won the African Cup of Nations four times, and in all those separate occasions the team was then managed by local coach. When he in charge of the national team, Akwasi Appiah led Ghana to qualify for the last World Cup event held in Brazil; and, had it not poor leadership, and bad blood existing between GFA and the Sports Ministry, including indiscipline attitudes on the part of some of the players, Black Stars would have been highly successful in that 2014 competition.
As commonplace in Ghanaian society regarding the sheer disdain for made-in-Ghana goods, some of the national team players also have scornful tendencies toward local coaches. In most cases it is hard to detect these disparaging propensities, yet they exist, overtly or covertly. Let GFA hires any foreign coach, irrespective of his average resume, the players as well as a considerable number of Ghanaians will begin singing his praises as the so-called master tactician and savior of Ghana soccer. Sadly, many of the players and Ghanaians as well normally don’t extend the same morale-boosting accolades to a local coach as witnessed in Akwasi Appiah’s case.
Instead, what many Ghanaians become busy looking out for is any mistake that may appear to prove their cynical albeit unpatriotic motives that a local coach is not as adept as a foreign one. So as the Ghana FA is currently searching for a national soccer team trainer, a bunch of self-loathing Ghanaians is pushing the country’s football association to ignore considering any local individual for the head coach job. According to the opponents of native coaches, bringing in a foreign coach will inject more competence and winning outcomes for the Black Stars. But the aforesaid line of reasoning has fallen flat over and over again in that Ghanaians have been on this inferiority-complex highway several times and the results do not bode well for the Black Stars.
From the look of things, it looks as if Ghana has a lot of money and the leaders, especially the soccer officials, don’t know how to use the resources to develop the nation’s ebbing football in general rather than waste them on average expatriate coaches. Many of the country’s priorities are misplaced; and the people with creative ideas are often not listened to or shut off of the national debate unless one proves to be a fawning sycophant. As a Ghanaian friend in London commented recently, “The rigorous discourse that makes people think critically is missing in our country [Ghana today].” Hence, a lot of Ghanaians seem to have mortal hatred for impassioned assessments of issues of national importance. Whenever they can’t offer any credible justification for their shallow positions they resort to tribal insults and ad hominem attacks.
Moreover, let’s keep in mind that the most significant benchmark in gauging success in soccer is winning championship trophies. Some Ghanaians derisively argue against hiring local coaches for the Black Stars while clamoring vociferously for expatriate trainers, but Ghana is yet to see any foreign coach who has ever won a soccer trophy for this country, if this writer is not mistaken.
If possible, GFA can go ahead and hire the services of Pep Guardiola or Jose Mourinho and it may not translate into any extraordinary accomplishment for the national team. We all saw the performance of Jose Mourinho the last time as Chelsea’s coach when the players’ mindsets weren’t right. In Ghana’s situation, unless those indiscipline and rich arrogant players show humbleness and the burning desire to excel for their country as many “kill themselves” to do to impress their various clubs in Europe and elsewhere, no coach can make much notable impact on the team’s waning fortunes.
Plus, any average coach, whether white, black, local or foreign, can make huge difference, if a team has state-of-the-art sports facilities, multimillion team budget or billionaire owners willing to buy talented and ambitious players from across the globe. And lest we forget, if Ghanaian local coaches have access to many self-discipline players with strong mental resilience and respect for their (local) coaches as successful national teams such as Brazil, Italy, Spain, Germany, or at club levels like Barcelona, Real Madrid, Chelsea and many others enjoy, most likely many Ghanaians wouldn’t be looking down on the thought of hiring one of their own as national coach.
In short, Coach Akwasi Appiah is as competent as any coach ever handled the Black Stars before, but regrettably, he is caught in the web of Ghanaians’ inferiority complexes and their insatiable taste for everything foreign, as well as the GFA’s intra-office politics, including in this part of the world, to borrow the biblical quotation once more, “Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown.”
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