"A country like Ghana deserves a good pitch", Angola's coach, Pedro Goncalves said in his post match conference. This is not rocket science! Ghana
“A country like Ghana deserves a good pitch”, Angola’s coach, Pedro Goncalves said in his post match conference.
This is not rocket science! Ghana should be four, five or six steps ahead of 90% of all the other 53 nations doing football in Africa.
As one of the pioneers of the game on the continent, Ghana should not be in the position of struggling to get a better pitch to play football.
You simply do not need a soothsayer to tell you that football authorities in Ghana are just not up to the standard required to do the business.
CAF mentioned 22 countries ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup qualifiers to play their home games away from home because they don’t have venues that meet their standard. I will not be surprised if Ghana is named as the 23rd nation.
After 4 incredible FIFA World Cup appearances, the nation should be doing far better than this in terms of only quality pitches. The country has more than 20 venues that are almost modern but the problem is all about maintenance.
Ahead of the Angola game, a three day church programme was organised on the Baba Yara pitch and it just put it in a deplorable state. With barely a week ahead of the game, NSA and Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly joined forces to help the pitch regain it’s beauty and appeal.
Against Angola, you could see from the press box that the pitch was not good enough for both sides.
“I don’t like to do this but the pitch to be honest, the guys did really well in the second half to control the game. We have to work on the pitch to get better because it is very difficult and also because mistakes can happen,” Otto Addo said.
Head coach of Ghana, Otto Addo’s comments suggest that his boys struggled to control the game because the pitch was not good enough. A team full of European-based footballers should not be joking about pitch quality because they are used to playing on such turfs.
It’s about time CAF and FIFA intervenes to suspend countries that are unwilling to meet their standard in terms of venues for football.
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