Having dominated African football in the 1960s and 1970s, the 42-year AFCON drought has left Ghanaians nostalgic for glories past. Anthony Yeboah, a two-time winner of the Bundesliga golden boot, with Eintracht Frankfurt and Hamburg, admits that a failure to win an AFCON championship for Ghana is a huge stain on an otherwise sterling career. “When you become a successful footballer and there are one or two things you do not achieve, there will surely be regret,” Yeboah told the Guardian. “Teamwork is very important. When teamwork is not working, but you just have individual players, you can’t achieve anything. This was the problem that we had.” What happened with that 1990s generation, which included the footballing legend Abedi Pele, is replicating itself with the current Black Stars, which includes André and Jordan Ayew, his two sons. A 2-1 defeat against Cape Verde in their tournament opener on Sunday left the manager, Chris Hughton, searching for the right words to explain to millions of angry Ghanaians why they had lost. “We can’t concede the type of goal that we did in the last minutes of the game, particularly at that stage, because we were pushing to get the winner,” Hughton said.
“We conceded a very poor goal and hence a hugely disappointing start for us.” The former Newcastle and Brighton manager was later almost attacked by an irate Ghanaian fan at their team hotel. With a record of four wins in 11 matches since taking charge of Ghana last February, Hughton heads into a potentially defining game against the seven-time Afcon winners Egypt on Thursday. After Ghana’s first-round exit at the previous tournament in Cameroon, a repeat of that very poor performance will go down very badly indeed. “There was a lot of confidence that Hughton would significantly improve the team, but none of that has happened,” the Ghanaian football expert Mike Oti Adjei said. “I think that whatever happens in Ivory Coast, it is highly unlikely he will stay in charge. The relationship between him and the Ghana FA has been rocky for a while, and I think they will go separate ways afterwards. “Ghana has won once in the last 10 AFCON games and lost the last two games against Comoros and now Cape Verde. Unless the team improves in every aspect, I struggle to see how they would beat Egypt.” José Peseiro, Nigeria’s Portuguese coach, is having an equally torrid time with the three-time winners. Successive 1-1 draws against Lesotho and Zimbabwe in 2026 World Cup qualifying did little to bolster his battered credentials with a critical Nigerian audience. “I believe in the players. Each team has more quality in certain positions,” Peseiro said before the start of the tournament.
