One thing is for sure. The Black Queens will give it their all, they will fight tooth and nail but this would not be enough in the end as they will be badly exposed by the enormous quality of the Cameroon team.
Ghanaians ought not to be deceived. For all the investment done in refurbishing the Accra and Cape Coast Stadia, the training pitches at El-Wak, Presec, Ndoum and Robert Mensah, we failed massively to make the vital investment in the team and we will rightfully be punished for it.
Come Friday, Cameroon will beat the Black Queens. We would be lucky if we don’t get thumped, it is that simple. Our team is not GOOD ENOUGH!
Ghana should have wrapped up qualification by the time they played their most difficult game in the competition against Cameroon.
We fluffed our lines against Algeria who are all but out of the competition and critically weren’t effective with all the possession we had in the shock defeat to Mali.
The Black Queens lack a lot of things to match up to the aspirations of the many Ghanaians who don’t have the privilege of knowing the true state of the team.
This is by far, the worst Black Queens side in its illustrious history and we don’t deserve to be amongst the best to progress to the last four of our own party.
One might be deceived into thinking I’m being too much of a pessimist but again that is the collective failure of we the journalists especially the ones that covered the Black Queens extensively over the past few weeks.
We failed to bring to the masses the true state of the team and as a result, expectations have been overly inflamed.
Of course there should be some positive takeaways like the emergence of Sherrifatu Sumaila and the fact that another good crop of Black Queens – all things being equal – might emerge from the current Black Maidens who are doing us proud at the FIFA U17 Women’s World Cup far away in Uruguay.
The Black Queens however from the onset, were set up for failure. All the focus towards the hosting of the tournament was getting all facilities ready so we’re not stripped off the hosting rights.
This was to the detriment of the team. Their preparations were that poor and we belatedly tried to salvage this by going on some sort of training camp in Zambia and Kenya. Then we played South Africa here in Accra to wrap up preparations. Of course we also played and won the WAFU tournament.
Contrast this to that of Cameroon, they played in the COSAFA Cup, they played France, Zambia and Cote d’Ivoire in friendlies. 14 players that played and lost the finals of the last AWCON to Nigeria are in the current squad.
And yet still here we are, willing to beat Cameroon – one of the favourites to win the competition – to revive our own campaign when we’ve not scored more than twice in the two games we’ve played thus far.
Miracles do happen, but we’ve not helped ourselves that much to merit such a miracle.
We’re never going to get the number of chances we missed against Algeria when we face the Indomitable Lionesses and surely, they’ll open us up at will.
This is the point where we just have to start scripting words of encouragement for the Black Queens as the inevitable approaches.
Let’s concentrate on putting up a show with our hosting of the tournament and long forget about our team doing that well for we have not done enough to deserve it.
