We don’t need expatriates to handle Black Stars – Sports Minister

Sports Minister Nii Lantey Vanderpuye has stirred the hornet’s nest, provoking debate over the country’s obsessive taste for foreign coaches over local ones.

The Minister is emphatic that the level of play at the senior side and quality of players points to the fact that any supported local coach can chalk laurels with the Black Stars.

“The coaches’ work is important, the coaches’ work is needed, but I will say at the level of the senior national team, for example, I don’t believe that we definitely need an expatriate in order to achieve,” Mr. Vanderpuye told Kwesi Pratt Jnr. on TV3’s Hot Issues to be aired on Saturday at 4pm.

He had early on explained: “The best of our achievements as a nation, have been under Ghanaian coaches…I always ask myself what is it that is in the brains, in the genes, of that white man that is not in the black man?

What we need may be investing a little bit more in them… “At the level of the national team, the Black Stars, whatever the coach teaches them is just about 5% of whatever they know. Because these players are already stars in their own right…”

Asked why the country keeps ‘importing’ expatriate coaches, the Minister blamed it on the Ghanaian misconception. “I think the problem has to do with the Ghanaian, the Ghanaian always have that feeling that something from outside is better than what you have … I don’t share that opinion”. According to the Sports Minister, when Ghanaian coaches are given the opportunity, they would be able to rise to the occasion.

“I believe somebody like Akwasi Appiah was a wonderful coach, I believe seriously we didn’t give him enough time, we didn’t come to understand him very well,” he stressed.

Nii Lantey Vanderpuye added that the lack of respect for local coaches, usually exhibited by the media, contributed to his inability to please Ghanaian fans. He also downplayed claims that Ghanaian coaches are prone to bribes.

In defence, he explained, every good coach wants to achieve results, and would therefore pick the best players to enable him win. He is hopeful the many former Black Stars players who are going into coaching would be able to take over the national teams so that a national identity can be established: in order that the juniors are not thought something almost different when they get to the senior level by an expatriate, depriving them of their Ghanaian identity.