Augustine Ahinful: Lack of player consistency in Black Stars our bane
The Ghana Black Stars recent series of poor performances has been blamed on the lack of consistency in player invitation to the national team.
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This, according to Augustine Ahinful, a former Black Stars attacker, won’t help improve the team until the handlers realise that they must build the team around a core number of players and stop changing players every now and then.
He told Graphic Sports in an interview that the rate at which the handlers kept changing players in every national assignment suggested there was no plan and noted that it wasn’t the best way to build a formidable team.
“Our team lack a bit of consistency, we’re not consistent in the sense that we keep changing our team every now and then. In the national team you can’t keep on changing players all the time. When you do that, you have issues,” he stated.
The former Ankaragucu of Turkey player observed that Stephen Appiah’s era became very successful because there was consistency, and everyone could easily predict the players that would be invited to camp at every time unlike now where players are called at random.
“Everybody talks about Stephen Appiah’s era and what they did before we qualified for the World Cup. Yes! Because there was consistency. At that time every call-up you’ll see John Mensah, John Paintsil, Laryea Kingson, Stephen Appiah, Sulley Muntari, Michael Essien so there was consistency,” he said.
“Now we don’t have that. The last match we played at Kumasi against Central African Republic and then the one we played in America, the players that we invited basically were not the same players that were in America,” he admitted.
He also blamed the formation that coaches used which he said were not best suited to our style of play and urged the coaches to invite players that were well suited for the formation they intended to play.
“Ghana does not have any system that we play, but the coach should always have a system for the team. The players you have will determine the system or the format you intend using and the players are selected by the technical handlers.
“So if you select a player and he comes in and cannot slot into the system that you want to use then you the handler have a lot of work to do,” Ahinful noted.