By Brima Bah
After the South Africa FIFA World Cup 2010 - hosted in the continent for the first time in the history of the tournament - it was hoped that it would inspire Africa to higher heights in the game millions of Africans so passionately follow.
Africa, through Ghana, then came very close to overcoming the quarter final hurdle that the continent had found impossible to jump. Four years on, African football fans were highly anticipating an improved performance by the continent at Brazil 2014.
Disappointingly, however, not only did none of the continent’s five representatives make it through to the quarter finals, only two made it to the knockout stage, and, apart from Algeria who put up a sterling performance against Germany, it was all a damp squib and an embarrassment to the continent in the glare of global attention over pay and bonuses.
The individual countries are currently engaged in soul-searching and looking to pick up their broken pieces, patch up and return to the ceaseless qualifiers for regional tournaments.
While a country such as our dear Sierra Leone is not regular in the show piece events, we have a track record of trying to qualify and even coming very close. But like Africa and the World Cup quarter final demons, we are yet to cross that line and make it into the finals of major tournaments since we last did for the African Cup of Nations in South Africa in 1996.
18 years of trials and errors, post-mortems and surgeries, we are still struggling. Is it a question of doing the right thing or doing things right? There may not be a clear-cut answer to that question but an attempt at an analysis of the new National Plan of the newly-crowned World Champions may help us at least make sense of what is really a confusing picture in our local game.
The German plan implemented in 2004, after years of disappointing performances at tournaments, can spring up some parallels with Sierra Leone even though drawing parallels between the two countries would safely be referred to as a long stretch. But the principle and lessons learnt by the Germans could, at least, be inspiring to us.
Anyway, they didn’t come up with anything new; they only did what successful footballing nations did to become successful: they restructured, reviewed their philosophy, and designed a national plan that incorporated best practices from other nations. They kept their long balls, but also brought in a bit of tick-tack football which won them so many fans, and indeed helped them claim the ultimate crown. But that is just at the tactical level and only what we saw in the month-long tournament at Brazil 2014. There was much more to those displays and they didn’t come about overnight: it was a ten-year-long project come to fruition!
In Sierra Leone, neither momentum nor by setback has spurred us up. The 1996 wind in our sail petered out and appeared to have been a fluke. Not only did we fail to build up on that momentum, we have also not been able to rebuild our national teams at all levels. The longest plan we ever keep runs between the announcement of qualifier fixtures and our eventual failure to qualify. Even then the plan is never sustained; it most times runs one week to an encounter and ends even before the final whistle of the match. There are no reports or audits. Until the next fixtures, players are either dissatisfied and the nation is left without a programme in mind to build up on the triumphs and improve on the pitfalls. Until then the FA and the Ministry of Sports would be bickering over how badly the match was organised, and who should account for what and to whom.
Not that any reports ever come out, anyway. Planning is what we don’t have. Pre-planning is negligible, stock-taking is nonexistent. We try to prepare for each match, but we end up doing it so inadequately that we are never surprised when we lose or fail to win crucial matches at home!
When Germany failed to get past the group stage in EURO 2000 and 2004, and that heart-breaking loss to Brazil in the 2002 Japan/South Korea World Cup final, the national plan to invest in football youth centres was launched in 2004, spearheaded by Juergen Klinsmann, coordinated by the German FA and of course supported by the entire nation. Youths, real young boys, were targeted, educated, trained and prepared in various training centres across the country by qualified and trained coaches for the ultimate glory. Germany currently boast of no less than 32,000 FIFA-licensed A and B coaches. Here is the outcome of the ten-year project: 15 of the 23 German players in Brazil 2014 played in UEFA age group tournaments between 2002 and 2009 with 10 making it to the grand final and only one losing out, that was Philip Lahm in 2002 U19. That was two years before the project was launched! All the other nine had won gold in major youth tournaments: UEFA 2008, U19 (Ron-Robert Zieler), UEFA 2009 U17 (Mario Gotze, ShkodranMustafi), UEFA 2009 U21 (Manuel Nuer, Benedikt Howedes, Jerome Boateng, Sami Khedira and MesutOzil). Of the 23 players, only four had been in the German senior squad before 2008. These are Miroslav Klose, Philip Lahm, Bastian Schweinsteiger and Podolski.
In our dear country, what is yet to happen is to tap into the boys when they are truly young. The idea of giving Mohamed Kallon the responsibility of taking care of the national U17 side is a welcome move. However, the truth is that all the boys had to go through MRI scanning to determine whether they are in fact less than 17 years of age. As of typing this piece, I understand that the results are still being awaited. This situation should not have even arisen had the players been in school and at the appropriate age level. Youth football is not run out of the school system. The Football academies are supposed to have the full complements of regular schools, with the only difference being a bit more emphasis on sports, but certainly not at the expense of other curricula. It’s therefore not surprising that the best players most times come from amongst the most intelligent boys in the academies. While the Craig Bellamy Foundation and junior teams such as Kallon FC, Real Mack, Pizzo, Ibrahim FC, Malcolm X FC and others in the Western Area are doing their bit, together with a couple of teams in the provinces, we cannot be sure of the real quality they are producing, with the exception of the Craig Bellamy Foundation which we know is at least giving the boys quality education from their Tombo academy. This is why it has to be a national plan, supported by government through the Ministries of Education and Sports, and may be even Social Welfare, because of the age thing and the abuse of the boys by so-called teams that do nothing more than get the boys out of school in the name of coaching them to play a game they themselves are not experts.
If we invest in the game, get trained and qualified trainers, do it through the school system with proper supervision, we will be sure of producing disciplined players who would boost our local game, enrich the quality of our list of foreign-based players in truly competitive leagues, and mature to the point of giving us the national representation we can hope will fly the green, white and blue flag at the international level.
What we are doing now remains the same old thing: trials and errors. It has gotten us nowhere, yet has cost us an unquantifiable amount of resources that could have been used to better the lives of the many youths who have been abused and frustrated by our very sporting system, a system that could not only command an enviable market that would better the lives of so many, contribute to national development and indeed bring glory to the country, if well managed.
(C) Politico 22/07/14
