A sports journalist and football analyst, Nana Kwaku Agyemang, has given an open piece of advice to the re-elected president of the Ghana Football Association (GFA): embrace criticism from sports lovers. According to him, wisdom is not the reserve of a single person, and there is a need for the president to be more inclusive to further the cause of sports in the country.
Speaking to Mark Smith on the Daybreak Upper East show following the re-election of Kurt Okraku as the GFA president, Mr. Agyemang said that Kurt’s notion of his inability to work with his enemies does not augur well for the development of sports in the country.
He said, “If I were Kurt Okraku, I would seek to be more inclusive because, you see, at the start of his tenure, he said he wouldn’t work with his enemies. That is not a wise thing to say. In fact, there is an English proverb that says, ‘Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.’ There is no wisdom in not running an inclusive football association because no one man is the repository of knowledge. If there were any advice I would give him, it would be that he should be more inclusive because he doesn’t know everything, and the people he surrounds himself with don’t know everything either.”
He further admonished the president and GFA executive members to allow coaches of the national team to work freely without interference. He said, “The display that we see from the Black Stars quite frankly can’t bring back the love. It certainly won’t be able to bring back the love when we have players that are being selected, and even supporters on the streets know that their time has passed and perceptions about selecting players are purely based on marketing opportunities. When you see the squad playing, you can’t even see the imprints of the coach. You can see that the coach’s selection is still heavily influenced by the management of the Ghana Football Association. So, in terms of bringing back the love, we want to see the independence of a coach to select the players that he wishes to select.”
Touching on the Ghana Premier League, Mr. Agyemang said many people hold the perception that matches are bought and sold. “People have begun to understand that the Ghana Premier League represents matches that can be bought and paid for before they go onto the Park. We saw it with Nania FC many years ago, and it repeated itself with Ashgold against Inter Allies. These are clear examples of how bad things are. It’s because the system allows this to happen, and that has really led to the lack of interest because we can look at the fixtures and predict who is going to win. We can predict it very easily, so the level of competition is not there.”
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Samuel Adagom|Ghana
