Dr. Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe, a senior board member of Hearts of Oak, has attributed the club’s heavy loss to JS Saoura in the 2021/22 CAF Confederation Cup to the age of most players.
According to the esteemed statesman, during the game in Algeria, the Hearts of Oak players lacked speed, strength, and skills, which ultimately led to their defeat in the North African country.
“The way I see football now, you must have speed, strength and skills. If you have these three plus resilient, you should play anywhere in the world. If you watch modem football, this three are important, that’s why I have been hitting on when a player is old, he should be released. The match we had recently in Algeria, clearly our boys were aged”, Nyaho-Tamakloe told Hearts of Oak media in a video on YouTube.
In that particular match, Hearts of Oak suffered a 4-0 loss to JS Saoura in the remote west Algerian city of Bechar, resulting in a 4-2 aggregate defeat in the play-off. Prior to that, they began the 2021-2022 African club season in the elite CAF Champions League but were eliminated in the final qualifying round after a 6-1 defeat to Wydad Casablanca in Morocco.
When asked about what Ghana as a country needs to do to revamp its football, Dr. Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe suggested that the country should focus on training young footballers and building a strong team using their youthful age. He reminisced about Ghana’s dominance in African football, pointing out that during the time of players like Baba Yara, they had a youthful team with players in their twenties and even below.
He emphasized the importance of preventing age-cheating and other dishonest practices, and suggested that government investment, similar to what Kwame Nkrumah and other leaders did in the past, could help achieve positive results since individual companies are not heavily investing in the sport.
“So I think if the country really want to forge ahead, then we need very young footballers to be trained and use their youthful age to build a strong team. We dominated football in Africa and during those times, we had a youthful team. During the Baba Yara’s time, they were in their twenties and some were even below. Ofei Doodo started at 18 and was playing in the Black Stars.
“But right now, we have had a lot of age-cheating and other dubious acts going on and with that you can’t build a good team, you certainly can’t. And since individual companies are not pumping in money, it’s the duty of the government to pump in money to get good results just like what Kwame Nkrumah and other leaders did for Ghana football.”
