Vice Chairperson for the Youth, Sports and Culture Committee of Parliament, Eugene Boakye Antwi, has expressed his frustration at the country’s fixation on appointing expatriate coaches to lead the senior national team.
The Black Stars are currently under the leadership of Chris Hughton, who was appointed as Otto Addo’s successor after serving in the technical advisory role for the national team for almost a year.
In an interview with Citi Sports, the Member of Parliament for Subin Constituency in the Ashanti Region called on the Ghana Football Association to help equip local coaches and entrust them with long-term projects.
He also did not hold back on inquiring answers from the Football Association on the rationale behind the continuous hiring of expatriates to lead the national team.
“You take your nation to the World Cup tournament where you have to go make a name for yourself and you treated it as a part-time job when somebody wanted it full-time. Which bigger stage as a coach can you dream about, apart from the World Cup?” he asked.
“I think the government must have a way through the appointment of coaches, not saying they must interfere, but they must have a way of managing the Football Association because the FA belongs to the people of Ghana.”
“Going to the World Cup, we did not have money, the government provides it, but the government doesn’t have a say, have you heard of it anywhere. He, who pays the piper, causes the tune.”
“So when the national teams need money, they come to the government. After failing at the World Cup, you come back to the same person you failed with and appoint him as your Head Coach [Chris Hughton] and you say come and coach us.”
“What kind of yo-yo-ing is this? We take three steps forward and five steps backward. The Mohammed Polos, the Razaks, the Kukuu Dadzies and others, they are all around, can’t they manage the national teams?”
“Give them training and attach them to a team in Germany, Britain or somewhere for a period of six months or a year and let them come back. Can’t they manage our national teams?”
“All our competitors on the African continent are using local coaches. What’s this fixation with foreign coaches? And sometimes we don’t even have the money to pay them. Let’s try our own, because all the four tournaments that we won at the AFCON were done by local coaches”.
“So we have to go back to the basics”
Chris Hughton is the latest Black Stars Coach, who is an expatriate to be appointed by the Ghana Football Association and he came into the job as one of the most experienced foreign coaches Ghana has hired in the last decade.
The former Brighton & Hove Albion gaffer comes in with an enviable experience of coaching different teams in the famous English Premier League.
The 67-year-old gaffer has been tasked to qualify Ghana to the next AFCON tournament in Cote D’Ivoire next year and a lot will be expected of him at the AFCON.
The Black Stars have seen some highs under former Coach Milovan Rajevac, who guided the team to a quarter-final finish at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and also led the team to the final of the 2010 AFCON in Angola and lost to Egypt in the final.
