Former Sports Minister Edwin Nii Lante Vanderpuiye has added his voice to the on-going discussions about how captaincy issues affected Ghana’s chances of winning the 1992 Africa Cup of Nations Tournament.

The Black Stars squad of 1992 has mostly been tagged as one of the best-assembled sides. With a team boasting of star names like Abedi Pele and Anthony Yeboah, many football fans have been left wondering how Ghana failed to beat a less-fancied Ivorian side to win the ultimate.

Several claims have been made as a reason for the inability to win, but one which has survived these years is the issue of player disunity owing to captaincy.

Prior to the tournament, Abedi Pele was installed as captain of the team at James Kwasi Appiah’s expense, a decision that led to the creation of factions in the team.

The situation got out of hand when before the final, with Abedi Pele suspended, Anthony Yeboah was shockingly snubbed and Anthony Baffoe was surprisingly named captain for the game.

Nii Lante Vanderpuiye covered the tournament as a journalist and has revealed in an interview with Joy News that authorities failed to properly manage the egos of the likes of Pele and Yeboah.

“I think as a country we did not manage the two of them well. They were our two most prolific stars at that time, so each one of them will have an ego,” he claimed.

“Each one of them will have a certain aura around them, and a lot of our players will tend to lean towards one of them depending on how magnanimous that person was.

“So that was there, it’s the reality and I think the managers should have had that at the back of their minds and try as much as possible to create that team atmosphere and break that that sort of lineages before the tournament,” he concluded.