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February 2008

Well I hope everyone has had a good start to the New Year and that things are going well for all.

I returned to Cyprus for the holiday and it was nice to get home and recharge the batteries after what was a tough year for me on and off the pitch. Going to Africa and Malawi has been a great experience and working in Africa I can tell you is never dull.

The hardest part for me is not the teams or the players it is the general lack of organisation which affects all things football, without good administration everything suffers and this is the case in Malawi. We have some very talented players here who are doing well outside of Malawi but the local player’s suffer due to a lack of one thing or another and yet they still keep coming, the reliance of the African players is excellent and I am not surprised to hear that of the 20 Premier League clubs 15 of them are in Ghana!

Looking at the African Cup of Nations ten years ago you perhaps knew 1-2 players with the so called bigger sides, but thanks to many factors we now see players from all the teams that we now we see and have played against. For us Ghana was a dream and we were always going to be a long shot to get there , our narrow 0-1 loss to Morocco was the difference of us going to Ghana or not. I am not surprised with the results there in fact I predicted 7 of the 8 teams to get out the group stages Sudan who had been in excellent form ruining my 100% prediction. It seems that once they got to the big stage they froze and that’s where your top foreign based players experience comes into to play. Bringing me to what some is a controversial point, the timing of the African Cup of Nations…or is it? For me it’s a not in fact its so simple in that many of the best African players ply their trade in Europe and while I accept that Africa should do things to suit and benefit Africa I don’t see what all the fuss is about by having holding their biggest event at a time when no one else is playing football they would then have a captive audience where many more teams and sponsors would be interested in coming to the competition…

That’s all for now ……….have a great end to the season