Ghana coach C.K Akonnor explains decision to name home based players for next month’s AFCON qualifiers

Black Stars coach Charles Kwablan Akonnor has revealed that COVID-19 traveling restrictions necessitated his decision to name local players to start preparations ahead of the Nations Cup qualifiers next month.C.K Akonnor has invited 32 home based players for the games against South Africa and So Tom next month.Explaining his decision to GFA News, Akonnor insists he wants to avoid the challenges faced during the qualifiers against Sudan last year.”This is not the first time a national team coach is inviting home based players. For us, it has become necessary to do this because of the challenges we faced before the Ghana versus Sudan match when players were not able to come because of COVID-19 issues, said C.K Akonnor.”We made some late call ups but travelling restrictions and quarantine issues made things difficult for us. So, management and the technical team thought it wise to do this by inviting a chunk of home players to move to camp to prepare for the games.”We believe that once the time gets closer, we will look at the foreign players who are doing well and without issues of COVID-19 to join the players. With all this at stake, we (myself and the rest of the technical team) have been able to go around to look into what is going on with our clubs and I must commend our coaches for a good job done.”The players have done so well and we believe that those we have selected are the best in the country. Hopefully when the foreign guys are able to come and join them, we will have a solid team to play South Africa and Sao Tome.The Black Stars will travel to South Africa to play the Bafana Bafana before engaging So Tom in Accra dew days later.