German Coach Ralf Zumdick completed the first challenge to confront him in his new job as the man to revive the fortunes of Ghana Football, last Wednesday the 15th October, in Calabar, Nigeria at the 8th All Africa Games, where he led the National Olympic team the Black Meteors.

Notwithstanding the Black Meteors’ bronze medal, Ghanaians were not impressed with their outing in Abuja. Their 3-0 semi-finals bashing by Nigeria is a tragedy. This has been raising doubts about the ability of the Black Meteors to make it to the Athens 2002 Olympic Games.

This is given much credence when one takes into account the fact that the Meteors need to overcome South Africa, Zambia and Algeria in Group D of the African qualifiers to make it to the ancient great Greek learning city. Next week Sunday, the 26th of October, the Meteors open their qualifying campaign when they welcome the Amagluglug of South Africa to the Accra Sports Stadium. The South Africans, we all know, have always proved a thorn in our flesh at all levels of the game since they returned to international football in 1994.

In fact, only the Black Queens have been able to overcome South Africa, having beaten the Bayana Bayana on a few occasions. But none of our male teams has so far been able to stand the might of the South Africans. In the 2000 Cup of Nations, the Bafana Bafana eliminated the Black Stars in the quarterfinals right before our very eyes at the Kumasi Stadium. Neither have the Black Meteors been spared the South African rod. The Meteors, in fact, failed to make it to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games because they lost out to the Amagluglug when we were then in same group with them.

With all that history fresh in our minds, are we safe to be playing the South Africans first? No especially taking our shaky performance in Abuja into account. For a team that has deadly goal poachers like Bernard Dong-Bortey and Charles Taylor but yet had to rely on goals from midfielders, does the future look any bright for such a team? Perhaps the best thing that could happen to the Meteors will be the inclusion of some foreign-based players to help their cause. But wouldn’t these inclusions affect the technical strategies and tactics? The cohesion between players who played in Abuja certainly could now be developing and more harm could be done to their combination with the inclusion of new players.

But if the core of this team is kept, whilst some new and skillful players are added, it would go a very long way to help the team. Therefore I personally think it will do the Meteors a lot of good if Derek Boateng, Michael Essien, John Paintsil, Sule Muntari, Abdul Razal Ibrahim, Ishmael Addo could be invited to beef up the squad. In bringing in the foreign-based players, we must not forget about the hardworking local talents. Perhaps young sensation Shaibu Yakubu’s vital injury time equaliser against Zambia is a sign that the local based strikers will be there when they are needed most.

The Meteors, thank God, has already played the two other teams in our Olympic qualifying group. 0-0 and 2-2 draws with Algeria and Zambia respectively at the recent All Africa Games were good rehearsals to give the Meteors enough knowledge about those opponents. What we must aim to do during the qualifiers, will be to win all home matches and get good results away, if we should win the only ticket available from our group to Athens next year.

’The Cat’ Ralf Zumdick, has won bronze for us, a medal, an honour, so will stay in charge? If yes, then he must make sure he becomes the first man to lead Ghana to beat South Africa at any level of the game. In the Sydney 2000 qualifiers, the Amagluglug drew 2-2 here and inflicted a painful 1-0 defeat on us back in their backyard. So there is no doubt about the danger they pose. The Meteors round up the six match qualifiers when they host Zambia on March 28, 2004, by which time Zumdick should have handed us the ticket to Athens.