Impressions about ghana 2008

before the tournament started i had certain expectations for the organization, football, stars, teams, referees. but expectations is a thing and what i saw was a different thing. in this blog , i will try to summarize my impressions and my opinion about how the tournament’s matches went so far.

1- savage football: here, what i mean by savage is the football style. i thought that after African players went to Europe played there , there tactical level would increase. but i was wrong, an African player will always be an African player. he will always depend on physical power and spontaneous talent. a thing i noticed and was very obvious was, more physical playing and less pure football. i have to say here , without bias, that north African teams especially Tunisia and egypt and cote d’ivoire with them present more tactical football that doesn’t depend on physical power and depend more on team work.

2- bad organization: if i want to elaborate on this it would take more than one blog. but in brief, Ghana has made very big organizational mistakes especially at the beginning of the tournament. for example, when egypt arrived , they couldn’t find a plane to carry them to kumassy nor a hotel for all the team, moreover, their bags didn’t arrive until after 48 hours which led to the cancellation of 2 training sessions. also, the training schedule was very chaotic. some times the team went to train to find another team there or that the field doesn’t have lights. but i have to say things became better as we went through the tournament.

3- one man show: one thing that characterized this tournament was the one man show. every team had a player in each match that took all the lights from his team mates. for example: pascal fenduno, drogba, eto, zidan, abo trika, sofian alloudy…etc.

4- open defenses: 70 goal in the first round only is a new record for ghana 2008. defenses were very bad in this tournament, there were goals in every match except 2 matches only. i wonder what is the reason behind this??. maybe the defense players ability or the power of attackers.

5- bad goal keepers: no one emerged as a super goal keeper even el hadary was not as the same level he was 2 years ago.

6- average referees: i can’t say referees were good nor they were bad. some were pretty fair while, others were very very bad. the most obvious example is Ghana-morocco, when the ref canceled a totally right goal for morocco that could have changed the final result. but who would let the organizer lose!!??.

7- match fixing: Cameroon-Zambia…….no comment

9-low average attendance: the average attendance for spectators was very low compared to egypt 2006. this mainly has two reasons. first, the stadiums are small compared to Egyptian ones( Accra 40 thousand and Cairo stadium 80 thousand!!). second the Ghanaians aren’t very passionate about the tournament. for example at Ghana vs morocco match the stadium wasn’t full although it was Ghana playing a difficult match!!.

i would be more than happy if you share your opinions with me.

wait for egypt-Angola preview