This weekend, it was almost as if whoever was in charge of the global football script was a Ghanaian, positioned to shut down once and for all a debate we should not even be having in Ghana football.Hurt by one point from two games against Sudan and an outpouring of frustration at the result, Ghana coach Otto Addo sort to manage expectations of Ghanaian football fans by reminding us the quality of players available to the Black Stars now, is nowhere near what has given us the audacity, in his view, to expect them to beat teams like Sudan and Niger.Ghana fans, he said are "sometimes a little stuck in the past and we always refer to the past." He can't he continued "compare our players who have been playing Chelsea, Barcelona, Juventus, Inter Milan.
We had all these kinds of playersI can't compare them with all due respect to our players now.
Maybe they will get there but we are not there now."Otto Addo was effectively telling us to simmer down expectations.
It was a fair defence from a coach under pressure to explain why two glorious wins in 2026 world cup qualifying in June 2024 have been followed by three hopelessly poor displays in Afcon qualifying marked by a mix of incredibly poor finishing, a complete lack of invention, a lot huffing and puffing and many lamentable defensive errors.Addo argues quality of Ghanaian players doesn't march up glory yearsWe would get into how the players used the past weekend to firmly contest that view of reduced quality but even before them, we can interrogate that statement and whether Addo himself was not "stuck in the past" and blinded by nostalgia while making that statement.There are two Ghana teams that Addo could possibly have been referring to when he made that statement. There was the team that qualified and played at the 2006 world cup which the current Ghana boss was a part of.