Feature: Can Ghana win 2012 AFCON?

Published on: 21 January 2012

This morning, she looked rather hard into her antique mirror; it was her favourite item around her rather small but influential household within the entire community. As she studied her face, she noticed that particular contour.

That contour served its purpose well. For her, it was a painful reminder of her failure to capture the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) since she last won it in 1982 in Libya.

For her neighbours, it offered a ready tool to hush her up anytime she dared flex her matured football muscles. For 30 long years she has had to endure and watch in envy as her neighbours won several trophies and taunted her with them.

Indeed, after the 1982 feat, she went into some sort of a slump, even failing to qualify for successive editions of the AFCON until 1992 in Senegal, where she lost painfully to Ivory Coast in the final after a marathon penalty shootout.

Recently however, she has experienced good fortune: She qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 2006 and got to the last 16. She improved on that at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa where she got to the quarterfinal. She also placed third and second at the 2008 and 2010 Nations Cup respectively.

But for all of that, she hasn’t won a trophy of any note, much more the AFCON. She has watched as her neighbours, year in year out, decorate their cabinets with medals and trophies.

But this morning, on the eve of the 2012 AFCON co-hosted in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, she could feel a certain peace within her heart , that come February 12, 2012 when the final match is played in Libreville (capital of Gabon), her name, Ghana, shall be engraved  in letters of gold.

Amid those thoughts however, she felt a churn in her stomach, a timely reminder to reassess whether her chance of winning the 2012 AFCON were real or imagined. Her mind quickly switched to assessment mode.

She assessed the ability of the 23 players, representing the Black Stars at the tournament. Her major headache was the defence; would the captain, John Mensah, be able to maintain his fitness?

It was a worry, especially when Isaac Vorsah would be suspended for the first match against Botswana. Would Jonathan Mensah who returned not too long from an injury lay off also have the requisite match fitness? The possibility of lining up Lee Addy and late invitee John Boye in central defence at some point in time was thus a real possibility.

Do both players, good tacklers as they may be, have the requisite composure to shield Ghana’s goal? How about the lateral defenders? Would young left back, Massawudu Alhassan, have the mental strength required at such a high level? Or that job would be left to Daniel Opare to do.

Opare’s talent is not in doubt but then on the evidence of the friendly match against Brazil, in which he was exposed and eventually sent off, you would wonder whether playing Opare, a conventional right back, as a makeshift left back against accomplished players, would be worth the risk.

Then at right back, the coach of team, Goran ‘Plavi’ Stevanovic seems to have a special liking for the experienced John Pantsil though the latter has been inactive at his club, Leicester City. Wouldn’t that inactivity be detrimental to the team when Pantsil comes up against top opposition?

At the mention of opposition, her mind took a glance at the other 15 participating teams. Ivory Coast and Senegal quickly jumped out of the list as the major threats to Ghana’s quest for glory.

How would Ghana’s defence contain the super star attackers of these two teams? She imagined Senegal’s Demba Ba, Papiss Demba Cisse, Moussa Sow and Ivory Coast’s Didier Drogba, Gervinho and the rising Seydou Doumbia coming up against the Ghana’s fragile looking defence.

Indeed, even Plavi recognised the questions over the defence and fortified it by adding John Boye as the ninth defender while sacrificing a striker to obviously counter the deficiency in the defence.

Then, there is also the thin strike force. Injury to leading striker, Asamoah Gyan got a lot of hearts doing somersaults, and rightly so, because in his absence there is the unreliable Prince Tagoe who would be short on confidence after being heavily criticised in the run up to the tournament. That leaves young and inexperienced Jordan Ayew as the only viable alternative to Gyan.

Though Gyan has recovered from the hamstring injury, what happens when he has a bad day in the office or is off colour? Many are the question marks over the defence and the thin strike force presented by Ghana and for anybody making an unbiased assessment, Ghana winning the 2012 AFCON is a mere imagination.

However, there is also a realistic chance as Ghana has made steady progress which fans hope would be consolidated at the 2012 AFCON. Ghana pretty much has kept the core of the team that played at the last AFCON in 2010 and the World Cup in that same year and though the team has its obvious weaknesses as mentioned above, the team has made decent strides in the last couple of years for one reason. Ghana is tactically organised and this tends to absorb the perceived deficiencies in the weak departments of the team.

This sound organisation mainly relies on the talents of the midfielders. Udinese duo Emmanuel Agyemeng Badu and Kwadwo Asamoah would come into the tournament high on confidence and form. Andre ‘Dede’ Ayew, reigning BBC African Footballer of the year on a good day can create, score and also close down opponents.

Derek Boateng seems to have gotten a hang of the defensive midfield job, breaking and moving the ball very well and would fiercely contest Anthony Annan for the defensive midfield duties.

Sulley Muntari, despite his inactivity at club level, seems to always be a goal threat for the Stars and would surely nick in a couple. The midfield has thus become a pivot around which the Stars efforts are built and would be crucial in both shielding the defence and also creating opportunities for the attackers to score while scoring themselves. In the minds of such assessors, Ghana stands a real chance of ending the 30 year drought.

However, football over the course of history has shown that pre tournament assessments can sometimes be made nonsense of when the actual tournament begins.

The team that wins, sometimes is really not the best talent wise, but the team with the shrewd tactics, good administration and perhaps a little bit of luck.

Indeed, as these thoughts run through her head, she became comforted, hoping that come February 12, 2012, the contour on her face would not be from a frown but rather from a smile. That she would take gladly.

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