Yusif Abubakar has spoken for the first time after he was appointed head coach of the Ghana U-23 national men’s team on Tuesday.

The premier league winning coach with Aduana Stars spoke on Kumasi-based Silver FM and below are the key takeaways from his maiden interview since becoming the coach of the Ghana Olympic team.

On confirmation of his appointment

Yes it’s true that they’ve made me the technical head of the Black Meteors.

And it wasn’t done only on phone call.  Everything was on paper and I received my appointment letter today. This gave me the go ahead to even grant this interview as head coach of the Meteors or else I wouldn’t have talked about it.

On duration of his appointment

For the number of years, we didn’t discuss about that. What we are thinking about now is how we can qualify the team to the All Africa games and we shall see next. Qualification is the target now.

On his technical support staff

For my technical support staff  at the right time their names will be known. The assistant coach and the all the other important technical areas will soon be announced.

On the criteria of player selection

We are now going to sit down and draw the plan to approach this task. You know there is no league going on and the players are not active. But we will still put together list of players to confront this first hurdle.

If the dates of the games will allow us to invite foreign based players to join the local based ones we shall do so.

On club coaching 

I can’t talk about that at the moment because now I am without a club so I can say I am a floating coach.