I’m a little amazed at the tons of blame that is being heaped onto the Black Stars and their coach after their narrow defeat by Cameroon.
Some snigger at the inclusion and contribution of Andre Ayew on the grounds that the occasion was too important for his teenage mind and adolescent cartilage. His father was just as youthful when some coach took a chance with him. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, remember?
I’ve also heard others pour scorn at the goals which Junior Agogo scored. One overweight analyst called them easy tap-ins for any old arthritic. He had forgotten, first, that the ball wasn’t always resident in front of the “tap-in” area; that it had been manoeuvred from far afield through a minefield of 10 Nigerian opponents; and second, that Asamoah Gyan also had a tap-in but failed to tap it in. That clearly suggests that even tap-ins aren’t always easy to simply tap-in. After all, with a pre-positioned goalkeeper as the sole obstacle, aren’t penalties too tap-ins? Yet, some of the world’s best have been known to spray the ball into the stands instead of simply tapping it in.
I, too, was initially upset with Asamoah in that Namibia game but, hey, s…t happens. I don’t hold it against him.
Maybe some of these guys are finding it hard to deal with all the attention Agogo was getting from the girls – all the Agogomania. The young man will be out of town next week so they can have their girls back.
Some want the coach sacked for being allegedly “technically unimaginative” in the game against Cameroun. Admittedly, coach Claude le Roi isn’t terribly cuddly. But he’s the same man who coached the team to beat Guinea. And Morocco. The same man who made those changes which caused the seismic shift in the final minutes of the game against Nigeria. The same victories over which these morning-after, omniscient technical gods, with their gift of perfect hindsight, jubilated all night long.
If we were all half as committed to and worked a quarter as hard at our jobs as these young citizens do at theirs, life would be a lot better in our country.
So let’s give them credit. Let’s stop the blame game. And the nit-picking. And the fault-finding. And the fuss.
The boys played their hearts out. They gave everything they had.
Well done, Black Stars
Well done, coach..
Well done, Ghana.
