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downwards while the West Africans have soared

KWESI Nyantakyi is three years younger than Moses Chunga and just five years older than Peter Ndlovu.

He comes from a country where the football legends are Abedi Pele, three-time African Footballer of the Year, Anthony Yeboah, Sammy Kuffour, James Adjei, Osei Kofi, Sunday Ibrahim and Osei Kofi.
Kwesi was smart enough, in school, to graduate as a lawyer but football was always his passion and, in 2005, at the relatively young age of 37, he became the president of the Ghanaian Football Federation.

A year later, the Black Stars broke virgin territory when they qualified for their first World Cup finals and, at the premier global football festival in Germany, Ghana fielded the youngest team at the tournament.

The Black Stars were in the same group, with the Warriors of Zimbabwe, at the 2006 Nations Cup finals in Egypt, just a few months before their maiden appearance at the World Cup, and the two sides met in a thriller in Ismailia in their final pool match.

Benjani Mwaruwari and Cephas Chimedza struck for the Warriors in a 2-1 victory that night and, had it not been for a diabolical refereeing decision, which saw Joel Luphahla’s effort somehow being flagged offside, Zimbabwe would have qualified for the quarter-finals.

Ghana emerged out of that defeat to turn into the best performing African team, at the 2006 World Cup, where they were the only country from this continent to emerge out of the group games.
The Black Stars, who were ranked 48th on the globe at that time, and had just lost 1-2 to the Warriors in their final competitive game before the World Cup, performed better than Tunisia (ranked 21st) and better than Cote d’Ivoire (ranked 32nd) as they beat Czech Republic 2-0 and the United States 2-1.

Their only loss was a 0-2 defeat to Italy who would go all the way to win the 2006 World Cup.
The Black Stars were competitive against the Azzurri and only one point separated the two teams, in the final group standings, and that the Italians went all the way to win the World Cup put into context the quality of that Ghanaian side.

They crashed out in the second round, after losing 0-3 to Brazil, with Ronaldo scoring his record breaking 15th World Cup final goal, after just five minutes, and Adriano and Ze Roberto also on target.

Since then, the Black Stars, under Nyantakyi’s leadership at the GFA, have finished third at the 2008 Nations Cup finals, second at the 2010 Nations Cup finals and fourth at the 2012 Nations Cup finals.
Crucially, just like in 2006, they were the best performing African team at the 2010 World Cup finals as they battled their way into the quarter-finals and, in the last minute of that game, were presented with a golden chance to win and make history.

We all know what Asamoah Gyan did, blowing his date with destiny after missing that penalty against Uruguay, and Ghana didn’t recover in the penalty shootout lottery that followed to destroy the hopes of millions of Africans who had rallied behind their cause.

Nyantakyi has been showered with honours, for his vibrant leadership that has brought a breadth of fresh air into Ghanaian football, and has been fast-tracked into the Fifa Organising Committee for the football tournament at the Olympic Games and is now a Caf executive member.

He is a hands-on man, totally committed to his Ghana football project, and was with the team for each of their 11 days, during their training camp in Abu Dhabi, and personally inspected facilities at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, where the Black Stars are playing their group games, and the training facilities.

He wasn’t happy with the pitch at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University pitch, the training ground that the Black Stars are using at the 2013 Nations Cup, and made his feelings clear to the authorities and did not leave until he had received written guarantees that improvements would be made.

Nyantakyi was the man in charge of the Ghana FA, when the Black Satellites, the country’s national Under-20 team, became the first African representative to win the Fifa Under-20 World Cup in 2009 in Egypt.

He is a modern football leader, the Ghanaian fans and the media can interact with him on Facebook, he can answer questions as and when he gets time from his busy schedule, and he is committed to the development of youth football structures in his country.

He was on television last week, telling the world that the Black Stars’ team at the 2013 Nations Cup finals features 10 players who have never played at this level of the game and that, to me, is a sign of development, a sign of a football nation moving in the right direction and a sign of the right leadership in charge of its national game.

A national team, which only three years ago was good enough to come within just a penalty conversion of a place in the semi-finals of the 2010 World Cup finals, can now unleash 10 fresh youngsters, who have never played football at Nations Cup level, in its team for the 2013 Afcon finals.

In sharp contrast, while we were good enough to beat the Black Stars at the 2006 Nations Cup finals, and finished with exactly the same number of points as Ghana in our group, we have plunged downwards while the West Africans have soared.

The quick response you will get from our football leaders, some of whom were already in charge of the game at a national level when Nyantakyi was still in primary school, is that we lost our way because of Asiagate.

They will tell you this match-fixing cancer started in 2007, a year after we beat the Black Stars, and our Warriors were never the same again, were never a side that could be trusted again and their 2009 Cosafa Senior Challenge Cup success over a Zambian side, whose majority of players won the 2012 Nations Cup, was a fluke. We sold our soul in Cape Verde, they will say, when we lost that final game, because we were never supposed to lose to such lightweights, but when you consider they knocked Cameroon, including Samuel Eto’o out of the 2013 Nations Cup, and they are unbeaten in two matches against South Africa and Morocco, you begin to see the quality that they have.

Maybe our leaders are right, after all, that it was this Asiagate monster that wrecked havoc and cost us in Cape Verde, where a win would have taken us to the 2012 Nations Cup finals, cost us in Luanda, where a one-goal loss would have taken us to South Africa, and was at play at Rufaro, when we conceded that away goal that gave the Negras Palancas a lifeline.

Maybe Ghana have soared because they are the good boys, they are the clean guys who play far away from Asian match-fixing syndicates, that’s what I thought, until I read the book called ‘The Fix’, written by Canadian investigative journalist, Declan Hill, who spent three years in the underworld of Asian betting syndicates, investigating match-fixing and illegal betting. His classic was serialised by Germany’s biggest circulating weekly news magazine Der Spiegel.

Der Spiegel claimed that Ghana’s 0-3 loss to Brazil was fixed but the Ghanaian Football Federation have repeatedly dismissed the allegation.

Der Spiegel, Declan, Mafia And
Black Stars
Der Spiegel is one of the largest publications, of its kind, in Europe, with a weekly circulation of one million copies, interviewed Hill on September 1, 2008, after having serialised his book, and this is an extract from that interview:
SPIEGEL: In your book you say you think that the match between Brazil and Ghana in the round before the quarter-finals at the 2006 World Cup was fixed. The starting point for your investigation is an infamous Asian fixer.

Hill: In my book I called him Lee Chin. In November 2005 he invited me to a golf club on the outskirts of Bangkok. He claimed he was a leading member of a syndicate that manipulated football matches.

SPIEGEL: You then flew straight to the World Cup in Germany?
Hill: I watched Ghana’s first game against Italy in my flat in Oxford. Incidentally, Chin had predicted that Italy would win by at least two goals. Italy won 2-0, the performance of the Ghanaian team felt very strange, they seemed to play well but I thought there was something odd. I flew to Germany where I booked into the Hotel Maritim, where the Ghana team was staying in Würzburg, to find out.

SPIEGEL: Was that easy to do?
Hill: Interestingly enough, it was. Two days before the match against Brazil in the round of 16, Chin called and said that the deal with someone in the Ghana camp was on, 100 percent, he said. He was absolutely certain Ghana would lose by at least two goals.

SPIEGEL: June 27, 2006, the match ended 3-0 for Brazil.
Hill: The Ghanaians played as though they were putting their whole heart into it, but then there were a number of stupid mistakes — passes didn’t succeed, the defence was careless, the team collected three stupid goals.
After the game I was in the stands in Dortmund with tears in my eyes because I was convinced, at least emotionally, that the match had been fixed. I phoned Chin from the stadium: “I didn’t believe you, but you are a genius.”
He said: “How can I be a genius if I earn so little money with this?” In the summer of 2007 I flew to Ghana to find the runner. A crazy plan really, but if there was anyone who could confirm Chin’s stories then it was that runner.

SPIEGEL: How did you find him?
Hill: By chance. A newspaper printed a photograph of the coach — it was the man from the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. His name is Abukari Damba.

SPIEGEL: And what did Damba say about the World Cup match between Ghana and Brazil?
Hill: He had also been in Würzburg with the same match fixer from Malaysia, where they had stayed in a hotel opposite the Ghanaian team quarters, and Damba also admitted that he had gotten the Malaysian access to the team and that the match-fixer also approached the team captain Steven Appiah.

SPIEGEL: Did you speak with Appiah about the accusations?
Hill: Not just with Appiah, but also with the goalkeeper Richard Kingson and other national players too. They all assured me that they were completely unaware of any possible manipulation of the team in Germany.
However, one of the players did admit that he had been approached by Asian betters in 2004 during the Olympic Games. And they all said that Appiah was the captain of the team and that I should to talk to him. I met with him in an industrial area in Accra.

We talked in his car and he said that he had been approached a number of times in the course of his career and that he had taken money too. The first time was in 1997 during the Under-17s World Cup in Malaysia and also in 2004 at the Olympic Games in Athens; however he had been given money in order to win games, not to lose them. He claimed that he then shared the bonus among all the players.

SPIEGEL: Ghana’s team captain, who was until recently signed up to Fenerbahce Istanbul, says that he accepted money from outside agents?
Hill: That’s exactly what he said. I wanted to confirm this, so I spoke to him again over the phone, and he repeated his account.

SPIEGEL: And during the 2006 World Cup in Germany?
Hill: He was approached there too, but he says that he refused. I also asked him whether the Malaysian had gone to other teams too. He replied: “Yes, I think he did the rounds.”
So Why Are The Black Stars’ Soaring?

The Black Stars’ case, when you look at it, was at a higher level because this was the Fifa World Cup and they were playing Brazil and a win there would have taken them to the quarter-finals. It’s the same with Bafana Bafana, and the challenges they faced when their 2010 World Cup warm-up matches were questioned, leading to the Fifa investigation.
The difference, why The Black Stars have soared and Bafana Bafana could reach the quarter-finals of the 2013 Nations Cup finals, while our Warriors watch from home, has to do with our national football association response.

Ghana Football Association Official Response
“We have lodged an official complaint with the Ghana Police Service to investigate the allegations which are criminal in character and possess the unbridled tendency to impugn the sovereign integrity of Ghana.

“A critical review and analysis of the allegations attributed to Mr. Declan Hill pointedly reveal that his story was not based on any factual circumstances.

“He seemed to have relied heavily on secondary or hearsay evidence which remains uncorroborated by his alleged key witness whose identity he refuses to disclose.

“Mr Declan Hill’s allegations could at best be a figment of his own imagination. GFA has confidence in the integrity, commitment, and dedication of players of the Black Stars and notes with great pride the determination, sacrifice, toil and passion with which these gallant stars have lifted and continue to lift high the flag of Ghana.”

Steven Appiah’s Official Response
“When we discuss this we are doing exactly what Declan wants which is to create publicity for the book and drive up sales. The truth of the matter is that I have never accepted money to influence the outcome of a game and never will.

“If anyone has doubts, they should look back at the game and what it meant to us. To suggest we will throw all that away for some 20 000 dollars is ridiculous. He interviewed me but all I told him was that we are given money to win. Maybe he misunderstood me but I was only talking about winning bonus which is a common thing from the Ghana Football Association.

“As professionals none of us would give up the chance to beat Brazil and make the last eight of the World Cup for the sort of money he talks about. And, in all modesty, many of us earn much more than that.

“The amount of money he talks about compared to the money we made from reaching the second round alone makes his claim even more laughable.”

Fifa President Sepp Blatter’s Official Response
“I say this is impossible — two of the three matches in question were knockout games. The World Cup is the biggest sporting event on the planet; even more than the Olympics, no team wants to lose.

“(Journalist Declan) Hill has already made it clear that he never said those matches were fixed, but that there was only a suspicion.

“He made a speculation, but then it was written that he was speaking of facts. That isn’t the case.”

The Warriors Should Be Allowed To Rise
A number of Warriors have come out publicly in recent days to tell their fans, via the medium of national newspapers, how they feel heartbroken to be missing from the 2013 Nations Cup jamboree.
When you look at most of the games we have watched, the quality, or lack of it, on display, you feel it’s one tournament where our boys would have competed very well and even stood a very good chance of making it out of the group stages.

In 2008, as Ghana prepared to host the Nations Cup, following their good run at their maiden World Cup two years earlier, we didn’t know that the Black Stars were battling match-fixing demons.
It would have been easy, if we were following the drama then, to believe in Hill because even the great Abedi Pele was serving a one-year suspension from all football activities after having been found guilty in a match-fixing case in Ghana. He was just one of scores of officials and players from four clubs banned after two high-scoring matches, in the race for promotion to Ghana’s Premiership, raised eyebrows.

When you have a team like Pele’s FC Nania beating Okwawu United 31-0, as was the case in the final game of that season, then you had just cause to believe in Hill and his match-fixing conspiracy. When you had Great Mariners, who were battling with FC Nania for a place in the top-flight, also winning 28-0, over Mighty Jets, in that final round of matches, then you could believe in Hill and his match-fixing conspiracy.

“My contention is that while the scoreline may raise eyebrows, it does not provide irrefutable proof that the match was fixed,” Pele told the BBC, when he began to fight the ban.

His ban was subsequently lifted and Nania, Okawu, Great Mariners and Mighty Jets have moved on. And so has Ghanaian football, with the Under-20 team winning the World Cup in 2009 and the Black Stars growing from strength to strength.

Zimbabwean football, in general, and the Warriors, in particular, should be allowed to move on from this match-fixing madness and we simply need to look at the Black Stars to see how they did it and the fruits that they are enjoying this day.

Cuthbert Dube has said that will be his focus this year, to repair the battered brand of the Warriors and to make the national team competitive again, and that sounds progressive.

How do we explain that Method Mwanjali will be playing for Mamelodi Sundowns at Rufaro and Guthrie Zhokinyi can’t play for his team at the same stadium when they were slapped with the same ‘ban’?
It’s time to grow the game, Dr Dube, and you know that we can do it!

DeMbare And The Social Media
The Dynamos executive seem to have challenges in dealing with social media, especially the DeMbare Dotcom Facebook group, and the two parties have had an uneasy relationship for some time. Social media is with us forever and we have to live with it, whether we like it or not. It has offered the fans a voice and a platform to say what they want and what they don’t want about clubs, players, officials and even journalists and we can’t control that power or try to stop them.

Instead we must pick our lessons from what the say, the good and the bad, and try and make ourselves better because we are public servants and we are answerable to them.
I must be one of the most abused journalists on Facebook but I take it in the stride, it comes with the terrain and I have always said if I have the freedom to criticise others, why should I cry foul when others criticise me.

For the DeMbare executive to only expect positive coverage, when there is so much uncertainty in their camp and the departure of key players is frustrating the fans, is not only childish but certainly impossible.

What can’t be taken from Kenny Mubaiwa and his colleagues is that they have done very well, in the two years they have been in charge, and they have brought tranquility to the Glamour Boys. But they need to do more and the fans, who want the club to do better in the Champions League, have a right to ask questions, including some ugly ones, and their platform is social media.

Ndozvavepo boys dzangu!
To God Be The Glory
Come on United!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chicharitooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

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