Ghana football:Lovely box,Empty core

From the outside,Ghana football looks like it's heading for the high heavens and everywhere else beyond it.People are still talking about the wonderful display the Black Stars put up at the 2010 World Cup and how ready they are to challenge the world in 2014.That assertion was certainly underlined with a huge marker when the Stars gave a brilliant show against the 3 Lions at Wembley in a recent international friendly.Now,players like Asamoah Gyan,Andre Ayew,Kevin-Prince Boateng,Kwadwo Asamoah are being talked about as the stars to look out for in the future.Great news,isn't?So we can all presume that the buiding blocks are being laid right and the essentials are in the right place,right? The sad truth is a huge no.
Since January this year,it's been tale after tale of qualification or tournament failures for all our national teams.The local Black Stars failed to gain a point or a win at the CHAN in Sudan 2 years on from making the final in Cote d'Ivoire.Gutting.
The Olympic team,the Black Meteors couldn't catch the flight to the London 2012 Olympic Games after being outsmarted by Sudan in a two-legged tie and when we thought the Black Queens could give us an excuse to go London next year,they allowed a late Ethiopian goal in Accra to hand the ticket to an Ethiopian team we beat 4 years ago.Earlier on,the Black Queens capitulated at the African Women's Championship and got thrown out at the first round.Further down the line,the U 17 team,the Black Starlets got haunted by our longtime ghost and jinx,the penalty shootout, in a tie in Senegal to lose out on the African U 17 Championships and the World Championship.
What next? We don't know but how come is what we be asking ourselves.
Since 2005,we've given all our love,time and money to the Black Stars.Huge sponsorship deals,crazy bonuses and massive support drives have been either fixed or made to give the Stars the shine they deserve and honestly,the football they've played for the last 5 or so merits all these perks and even more.However,will it hurt if we looked at the other national teams the same way?
Football development should never experience segregation.Never.All the powerhouses of world football have almost always developed their senior sides together with all the other teams at the same time.While Brazil seeks to boost the Selecao,their women's team have now become a fixture at all levels of competition and the male junior sides are almost always present at all the youth championships and it's just one example of the simple yet effective being path being taken by other countries.
It's high time we looked at getting things right in this country.Without development,talent remains just that and the senior national team we all love and drool about will never exist.
To borrow the line from a song my mentor,Mr.Christopher Opoku loves so much,we'll soon have ''no wheels on our wagon'' if things don't change.