From a pile of more than a 100 coaches, we are down to three and may well be down to one by the time the eight man team put in charge of finding a new coach for Ghana complete their grilling of the three men aspiring to the job.

Humberto Cuelho, Herbert Addo and Goran Stevanovic are the last men standing. Marcel Desailly should have been in there but decided that after waiting for three months for the job, he could not afford to hang around for another week before laying out his plans to the Ghana Football Association.

Some have said good riddance to that because if he expected to get the job on a plate as he has suggested on other platforms then he was not worth it in the first place. If he could not deal with the relative small matter of delays in the appointment, how could he cope the many trying and testing moment every coach signed on by most African teams have to cope with?

It is not glorifying the process, it is merely stating the stark reality of life as bosses of many African sides will know. Things will not work as smoothly as what they are used to, at times they work at a painfully slow pace.

And this process has worked at a slow pace. It was in September, after victory over Swaziland in a Nations Cup qualifier that Milovan Rajevac, the Serbian who came here a nobody and left a big name decided he had enough of Ghana.

From the moment he walked, the talking and speculation about who would replace him begun. It has become a Ghanaian ritual. Every time there is a search for a new coach all the big names in the world are linked to it.

So we were told on a daily basis and sometimes to amusement how one great or another wanted to boss Ghana. Phil Scolari was one of them, apparently Sven Goran Erikson applied and Juande Ramos was so keen on coaching Ghana. Dunga, we were told put in an application after he left the Brazil job. In the end all that proved to be balderdash because the shortlist of five that the Ghana Football Association drew up did not certainly look like one that been drawn up from a list that included all those coveted names.

Marcel Desailly was the glamour name on it and even he had no coaching experience. Still many Ghanaians, myself included thought if Laurent Blanc had succeeded at coaching, why not him. It was an intense debate but many had seen Jurgen Klisman, Didier Deschamps and many others crack it and were in not doubt the World Cup winner could do it until his ill-advised press conference to announce his pull out.

Before Desailly walked, another of the candidates Can Vanli had been chopped off by the Ghana Football Association. Vanli’s CV said he was an assistant for Turkey at the 2002 World Cup, his personal website stated he had worked as a tactical analyst.

His presence on the list was bemusing, a pointer for many people that not a good enough job had been done on pruning down the list of over 100 coaches. In addition to being a tactical analyst, Vanli worked in the lower tiers of Turkish football and is now on the books of a club in the Maldives Islands. No disrespect but if you are looking for coach for World Cup quarter finalists, you have got to raise the bar higher than that.

The GFA say they have the bar high, so high that they have refused to rule out picking someone from outside their own shortlist for the job.

GFA vice-president Fred Pappoe said recently: “The fact of the matter is that today if we stumble on a coach who we are convinced who is ready, who is able, who is available and ready to the work and we are convinced stands heads and shoulders above the ones we have short listed we will go with it.”

Some have interpreted that as leaving the door open for Milovan Rajevac to return as coach. Yet with the ill-feeling that has been generated against him, the GFA will be taking too much of a risk.

So in the meantime we have to deal with three men, all trumpeting as much as they can their claim to the job. Herbert Addo reckons his local knowledge should make him the favourite. It is more likely; as former Black Stars captain John Eshun says though that he won’t get it. The GFA he claims won’t give it to a Ghanaian and it is difficult to disagree.

Addo has been here with us for years, is in charge of the local Black Stars and works with the present administration. There is nothing they don’t know about him that they will discover in the session they will spend with him. Like in previous excercises, he seems to be making up the numbers.

The real race you reckon is between a Portuguese and the Serbian. Cuelho comes with quiet a CV. His high point was taking Portugal to the semi final of the 2000 European championships but twice he has failed to get teams to the World Cup when botching the dreams of Morocco and Tunisia. That will be the one thing that counts against him.

Goran Stevanovic worked with turned out to be a poor Serbia and Montegro team that got nailed by all opponents at the 2006 World Cup. He then had two years at Partizan Belgrade between 2007-2009 as assistant before taking over as the main man. He has one league title to his name but was out after only a year in charge.

Now the GFA must decide whether to hand the Black Stars into his care as they did his or trust the well travelled and experienced Cuelho who has shown he is no stranger to World Cup qualification failures.

It is a tough choice that could make or unmake Ghana football at least for another two years.