Name change for Local Black Stars unnecessary!
Are we hearing well?
That the name ‘Local Black Stars’ for the senior national team as constituted by home-based players is derogatory!!!
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And that it should be changed to Black Galaxies, the name being proposed by the management of the team for consideration by the Ministry of Youth and Sports!!!
We carried the call by the Chairman of the local Stars, Fred Pappoe, in our last edition, the MONDAY SPECIAL, dated October 19.
He emphasised the need for the change of name to wean the team off the apparent derogatory term, ‘local’.
But we beg to disagree with Pappoe & Co that ‘local’ is not derogatory and should not make the home-based players feel any inferior to the main Black Stars.
Why should they?
Of course, the main Black Stars are superior and, therefore, the flagship brand and should be recognised as such. Nothing can be further than that.
For, we do not think that the demand for name change is to make the local brand of solely home-based players become superior to the main brand, which is a complete mix of both the best of home and foreign-based players.
Apart from this, we also think that the proposed name, Black Galaxies, may not be appropriate, since, in astronomy, galaxies are larger than stars. And, for us, none of the national football teams is bigger than the flagship Black Stars (of local and foreign-based players).
Pardon us if we sound repetitive, but as defined by the Macmillan Dictionary, a galaxy is “an extremely large group of stars and planets”, while a star is “a very large hot ball of gas that appears as a small bright light in the sky at night”.
We are told the proposal for a name change has been with the Sports Ministry for over two years now. We suggest this should not be part of the ministry’s hydra-headed worries, and rightly so that it has not responded since.
Indeed, for the team’s management and the players, what they should be worrying about now is how to turn on the form in their away game against their Ivorian counterparts to ensure that they qualify for the CHAN in Rwanda next January after their disappointing narrow 2-1 win in Kumasi last Sunday.
We find it baffling calls from various quarters requesting the change of even the name Black Stars as a whole because there is no star which is black.
For them, since there is no star that is black in the firmament, it is the reason the Stars are not shining in international competitions and have been bereft of honours in recent times.
However, when such lame and childish arguments are made, you tend to wonder whether once-upon-a-time there were black stars in the firmament which shone and which must be why our Black Stars were winning during that period.
But what is in a name? Arguably, we do agree there is something in a name. However, it is our contention that the name Black Stars does not exude negative vibrations as some will want us to believe.
For us, the significance of the name Black Stars lies in its positivity that Ghana is the star of Black Africa as championed since independence.