As Ghana strives towards building a formidable team to qualify for Brazil 2014, difficulty presents itself with shocking news of Andre and Jordan Ayew’s temporal retirement from the Black Stars.

Many displeased sports enthusiasts have resorted to throwing tantrums at the Ayew brothers for their decision yet forget that there are always two sides to the coin, meaning to every action there is a reaction.

In his letter to the Ghana FA, Andre Ayew blames his deteriorating relationship with the Black Stars management team for his decision to temporarily retire from the Black Stars.

I fear this very situation questions the competence of the Black Stars management in handling with issues of player relations with the coaching staff to ensure team unity, but does this mean the Ayews were right to have settled on quitting the national team. Certainly not! No footballer, regardless of his quality, should ever grow weary to the extent of withdrawing his service from the honorable call of playing for the glory of his nation, but the Ghana FA, managers of the state’s national teams, must also ensure the Black Stars management team does not hide behind this veil and fail to effectively resolve a player’s grievances, whether it is channelled to them formally or not.

Human resource managers at several companies do not always wait for employees to state their concerns officially before they are dealt with because in today’s world, firms are trying to retain their best serving employees, thereby devising strategies of fishing out employee challenges or concerns before they degenerate into huge problems. The scenario may be slightly different in comparison to the Black Stars but a similar strategy would have prevented the Ayews from quitting the national team.

After Andre Ayew was made to render an apology to Coach Kwasi Appiah and his team-mates for showing disrespectful gestures towards the technical team following his substitution in the 2013 AFCON qualifier against Malawi in October last year, one would have expected the Black Stars management team to hold meetings with Marseille winger with the goal of improving player relations but this was not done leaving the relationship between player and managers to grow sour.

Coach Appiah stated on ghanafa.org that after the Malawi game, “we tried to resolve the matter internally at a meeting but it yielded no results which resulted in my ultimatum.” The question is: did Kwasi Appiah escalate the matter to the Black Stars management team when he and the technical team could not resolve it? If he did notify the management team, then the immediate question would be: did the Black Stars management team try to resolve the matter after requesting for Andre Ayew’s apology?

As any institution administered by humans, the Ghana FA officials are bound to commit blunders but it is high time proper attention is paid to improving the strategies of the Black Stars management team in dealing with player concerns or grievances before more reliable members or promising talents in the national team are lost to us.