Ghana coach CK Akonnor has explained what informed his decision to call up only home-based players assembled from the Ghana Premier League for preparations ahead of the nation’s 2021 AFCON Qualifiers against South Africa and Sao Tome and Principe.
Although Ghana is comfortably placed on the on the qualifying table, tied on 9 points at the top of the standings in Group C, one would have expected that Ghana assembles, as usual, players plying their trade abroad for the last two qualifying games, but the former Ghana captain Akonnor has done otherwise.
Akonnor on Friday, February 12, 2021, named a 32-man home based squad to move to begin camping on Monday February 15 to begin preparation for next month’s double header qualifiers against South Africa and Sao Tome and Principe. This comes as good news for the locally based players, but not without questions of why not adding any foreign based player.
Speaking in an interview with GFA News on Friday, February 12, 2021, coach Akonnor explained that the move is to avoid a recurrence of the challenges in November last year. In the interview with GFA News on Friday, Akonnor explained the move in the following words as published by the GFA:
“This is not the first time a national team coach is inviting home based players. For us, it has become necessary to do this because of the challenges we faced before the Ghana versus Sudan match when players were not able to come because of COVID-19 issues. coach Akonnor said
“We made some late call ups but travelling restrictions and quarantine issues made things difficult for us. So, management and the technical team thought it wise to do this by inviting a chunk of home players to move to camp to prepare for the games.
“We believe that once the time gets closer, we will look at the foreign players who are doing well and without issues of COVID-19 to join the players. With all this at stake, we (myself and the rest of the technical team) have been able to go around to look into what is going on with our clubs and I must commend our coaches for a good job done.
“The players have done so well and we believe that those we have selected are the best in the country. Hopefully when the foreign guys are able to come and join them, we will have a solid team to play South Africa and Sao Tome” Akonnor added.
Below is the full squad:
