Ghana was a whisker away from making history. But, as Gamal Nkrumah advises, we shouldn't judge the team too harshly The spirit was willing and the flesh was anything but weak. The Ghanaian national team, the Black Stars, clearly controlled the ball for most of the match. The first goal went to Ghana, an event that propelled even further the soaring off-field status of the Black Stars as Africa's standard-bearers. With Ghana playing Uruguay for a place in history, Africans were so preoccupied with the fate of the Ghanaian team. Fans hoisted the red, gold and green of the pan-African banner chanting "Ghana make Africa proud". Clearly those accolades mattered hugely to the Ghanaians. Predestination, however, preordained that it was Ghana's destiny to bear the woeful news for the entire African continent. Ghana came excruciatingly close to being the only African team in the 2010 World Cup semi-finals, and at the same time, becoming the first African country to reach the semis. Three of the four other semi-finalists were European teams -- Germany, The Netherlands and Spain. The glamour boys of Ghana embodied the last great hope of Africa. To put this in a historical context, the victory that sealed Uruguay's admission to the World Cup semi-finals was the worst defeat inflicted on an African team in a top-flight match -- not in terms of the score but of what might have been. To be sure, Ghana had a magnificent World Cup, better than any of its continental compatriots and more. But the loss meant that the Black Stars let Africa down when the continent was so close. Africans expected the Black Stars to be firing on all cylinders in South Africa. And, the Ghanaians came awfully close to fulfilling the African dream, but fell agonisingly short. The Black Stars are stalked by their history. Ghana has been a trendsetter in Africa. It was the first country in the continent south of the Sahara to gain independence from a European colonial power, in the Ghanaian case, Britain. The feeling of being special seems to be rubbing off on the new generation. That is why the defeat by Uruguay came as such a stultifying shock. The beauty of the Black Stars is that unlike most other African teams of the tournament they put country, actually continent, before club. Their sense of team is sacred. Still, South America's dark horse upstaged the Black Stars, albeit doing so by sheer luck. By the time the game went into the penalty shoot-out following a 1-1 draw and high drama at the end, most Africans instinctively knew the outcome of the match following the unbelievable miss of the penalty that had been handed to Asamoah Gyan on a sliver platter in the last breath of extra time. When the Uruguayan striker Sebastian Abreu confidently chipped in the winning penalty, everyone could see that the African continent had already resigned to its ignominious fate. The Uruguayans didn't play better than the Ghanaians but they simply had better luck. That was galling for the Ghanaians, and all other Africans. The Uruguayans were widely seen as undeserving of their semi-final status after Luis Suarez intentionally handled the ball, an act that Ghanaian player John Pantsil later said a Ghanaian would never do. That does not make the Ghanaians feel any better, though. Ghana should have been playing with the big European boys. However, as Uruguay's seasoned coach Oscar Tabarez mused, "It's not our fault Ghana missed the penalty". Nothing could more poignantly express the African disheartenment than the image of the Black Stars' Dominic Adiyah covering up his face in shame and despair after his penalty miss. That was the defining moment for the continent. The Adiyah factor was deemed as one of the principal reasons why the Ghanaians lost the game. His performance in the Under 20 World Cup in Egypt last year confounded the critics. Adiyah, the unsung hero of the match as far as the Uruguayans were concerned, has since his debut on the international stage in Egypt, been worthy of world attention. Adiyah's story in South Africa sounds rather apocryphal. He failed to secure a starting place on the Black Stars in the quarter-finals much to the delight of Uruguay's youthful goalkeeper Fernando Muslera and coach Tabarez. It was Adiyah's header which Suarez stopped with his hands on the goal line but Adiyah, like John Mensah, was guilty of missing the crucial penalty kicks. The match before, Gyan had turned the Black Stars triumph over the US in the round of 16 into an amusing subplot that eventually witnessed the Empire striking back. In that match, Gyan forced his way past Bocanegra to score Ghana's winning goal in extra-time. On the brink of history, the Black Stars lost a golden opportunity. Ghana has become accustomed to be the flag-bearers of the African continent. If it had beaten Uruguay, Ghana would have become the first African nation to reach the semi-finals in a World Cup tournament. Ghana equaled Senegal in 2002 and before that Cameroon in 1990 by reaching the final eight but could go no farther. If ever a team looked ripe for bullying it was Uruguay after the Black Stars beat the United States. However, the gut-wrenching game was the very antithesis of Ghana's match with America. Instead of spraying their fans with champagne, it was soon time for the African favourites to be heading home. It all added up to a dream which so cruelly did not come true after Uruguay won the penalty kicks 4-2. It was of little consolation that Ghana followed in the footsteps of such Latin American giants as Argentina and Brazil. But to be beaten by the Latin Lilliputian Uruguay was nothing short of calamitous. Fans started to wonder whether the defeat would have been averted had the Black Stars not been plunged into an injury crisis that at one point threatened to rob them of some of their best players. Midfielder Kevin-Prince Boateng, nursing a hamstring injury, was not in peak form at Soccer City in the quarter-finals. However, he did score the fifth minute opener that determined the pace of the match with America. The absence of Ghana's biggest star Michael Essein from the starting line-up on the grounds of injury was a huge setback before the tournament began, but to the team's credit, Essein's absence failed to frazzle the Black Stars. As Ghana's injury list grew, then came Inter Milan midfielder Sulley Muntari's outburst with Ghana's Serbian manager Milovan Rajevac. Kwesi Nyantakyi, the president of the Ghanaian Football Association, backed up Rajevac's finger-wagging telling-off in public. "Muntari wasn't left out. He was reprimanded and if he misbehaves again, he will be thrown out," Nyantakyi had warned. African nations are notorious for producing scores of world class players for European clubs, but African national teams are not particularly impressive at World Cup tournaments. Ghana proved to be the exception to that rule. The Black Stars proved that Ghanaians are capable of producing patches of brilliance. Five of the continent's countries, after all, failed to join Ghana in the knockout phase. Moreover, two Ghanaian players, Jonathan Mensah and Andre Ayew, son of Abedi Pele, three times the African player of the year, picked up bookings and were suspended before the match against Uruguay. Ghana was the only African survivor of the group stage in this year's World Cup tournament, and was a whisker away from an unprecedented semi-final berth. That is how the Black Stars will be remembered whenever talk of the 2010 World Cup tournament crops up. Yes, Uruguay drew delight from Ghana's woe. After the game, Suarez, the anti-hero of the quarter-final, made his way across the pitch struggling to circumvent the Black Stars strewn across his path. Everyone felt Ghana was unfairly denied an all but certain goal. But Uruguay was no walkover. Uruguay is the tiny country sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil that can boast only one win over the two Latin American giants each in the past two decades. Long before Ghana gained its independence, Uruguay beat Brazil in the historic 1950 World Cup coup. For a team that was supposed to be too young and inexperienced, the Black Stars can be proud of what they have achieved in South Africa. They perhaps just couldn't fathom how they would fare in the face of the likes of impressive forwards such as Diego Forlan and Suarez. Indeed, how we view the Ghanaian performance during the World Cup tournament depends on whether we focus on the low moments or look at the positives, such as beating the Americans. Ghana's performance at the World Cup falls into the old conundrum as to whether their cup is seen as half empty or half full. If there had been any nerves inside the ground at kick-off, they were blown away by the time 24-year-old lone striker Gyan, who missed the crucial penalty that determined the course of the game, lost his nerve. Europe appears destined to clinch the World Cup. Ironically, it does so on African soil. Better the site than nothing at all.
