Four Lessons for Ghana’s Coach-Kwesi Appiah…Moving Forward

In his first game as a coach on the world stage, Kwesi Appiah led his Black Stars team to a 2-1 loss to the United States. Now in a group comprising of Germany and Portugal as well, most people saw this first game as our best chance for three points, yet it turned out not to be so.

There were some basic errors in Kwesi Appiah and his players’ approach to the game and unless these lessons from this painful loss are applied, the Black Stars might find themselves becoming worse as the tournament goes on.

Here are the four lessons Kwesi Appiah should pick from USA 2-1 Ghana

You start your best players in the toughest games

This is like coaching 101, you line up your team with the best players at your disposal. Obviously sometimes tactical demands lead to some better players being benched for inferior ones who can carry out a particular job better, but that is not what happened yesterday.

Kwesi Appiah after the game, in response to why Essien and Prince Boateng started from the bench, said he was saving them for when the US team got tired. I’m not even sure how that makes sense, since by benching these players you run the risk that when they come on later, your team might be irreversibly behind in goals. Both those players should have started, maximising our chances as we would have had our best 11 players on the pitch from the start.

You do not play your best player in Defence

If I were a coach, and I had Lionel Messi and Arjen Robben in my team, then I might consider playing one at left-back, since the other one would be left to cause havoc anyway. Now if I had only one of them, under no circumstances would I shunt him off to left back and leave vastly inferior players to try and break down the opposing defence.

This is not in any way a knock on our other stars, but Kwadwo Asamoah is our most skillfull and creative player, and playing him at left back is atrocious. Particularly when there are left backs in the team, and a left back was dropped from the final squad, and most of the play was channelled through the right. In fact, one of the few occasions the ball was played down the left flank it led to the equaliser, with which Kwadwo was vastly involved.

Concentration is key throughout the 90 minutes of a football game

Its debatable how much of this is actually on the coach, but the loss of concentration by the Ghanaian defence on those two occasions to concede those goals was criminal to say the least.

The entire defence seemed asleep as Dempsey zig-zagged through them to score less than a minute into the game, with John Boye even giving him a free pass into the penalty area. Conceding that early goal meant Ghana was always chasing the game, and the US were able to retreat into a defensive shape. The cluelessness with which the marking was carried out during the corner for the second goal was even more appaling. Kwesi Appiah and his team have a lot of work to do to brush out that tardiness from his defence.

Make Proactive and not Reactive changes

One of the hallmarks of the greatest coaches is the ability to recognise their mistakes and take steps to remedy them as the game goes on. The entire first half followed a similar pattern, the Black Stars were atttacking and attacking, whilst yielding little to no results from those attacks. Most of the play was channelled down the right, but Daniel Opare’s crossing was atrocious. Yet the right back continued throughout the 90 minutes of the game, wasting more and more crosses as the game wore on.

Jordan Ayew was obviously out of his depth, and it would not have hurt to make changes at half time to arrest the tide of the game. Yet Kwesi Appiah waited and dawdled on the touch line, hoping for a touch of inspiration—-his starting line-up was incapable of producing. We can never know, but some earlier changes might have changed the course of the game.

As we know, this was Kwesi Appiah’s first outing on a stage like this and inevitably there were going to be some blunders due to his inexperience. Last night’s game is gone, and the best we can hope for is that he learns from his mistakes and approaches the remaining games at a better level to glean some more respectable results for the Black Stars.