Head Coach of the senior national football team, Charles Kwabla Akonnor has blamed poor preparations as the main factor behind Ghana’s failure to win a major trophy in over 30 years.

After winning the Africa Cup of Nations title in 1982, the Black Stars have failed to shine, thrice failing to win the coveted continental showpiece. Ghana was inches away from winning the AFCON title but fell twice at the last hurdle to Ivory Coast (1992 & 2015) and also lost to Egypt in 2010.

The situation is troubling for most football followers in the country and Akonnor who captained Ghana at various levels of the national team says, averagely preparing for such major competitions has been the bane.

He, however, hints that the Black Stars isn’t far off from winning a trophy but stresses that preparations should be top-notch.

“I strongly believe that if you do prepare very well before carrying it on the field of play, you’re likely to be successful, 60% you can get it, the rest can be done by the players and everybody else”, Akonnor told Joy Sports.

“But we don’t really prepare well, every time there’s been issues. We are a strong nation, a football nation, within this period that we have not won the AFCON, we’ve been to the final like two or three times”, he noted.

“So we are not far from there, we need to prepare before we take it to the field of play”, he concluded.