Accra Hearts of Oak’s Serbian coach Kosta Papic is unhappy that the national premier league is going to be suspended for one month; to enable the home- based Black Stars to participate in the novelty African Nations championships from Feb 22 – March 8.

Papic, like any good coach, is convinced that one month lay off is too long a time for a player engaged in a marathon competition. He said this practice would not help any coach who is seriously engaged in building a good team.

“This kind of arrangement is not healthy to a national league which has a primary aim of developing local talent” the Serbian told the sports media almost in tears. I am sorry to state that the Serbian’s sympathies seem misplaced because the people put in charge of developing the game seem to have a different agenda and one cannot vouch that their aim is to develop talents. Cynics say the plan is to get as much attractive sponsorship as possible and arrange as many international friendlies abroad laced with cheap transfer of budding talents abroad. From the look of things they could be right.

Weep not Papic; if you cannot beat them join them. I admire your desire to ensure that your team, Hearts of Oak play well but what you call “ this up and down thing in Ghana’s football programme” has been with us from time immemorial and there is no indication that things would turn out to be better in the near future so bear with us.

This habit of the league being suspended for various reasons has been with us for decades. Ohene Djan, Ghana’s first Director of Sports used to abridge the league completely to make room for international assignments. When he left office and was consultant to Accra Hearts of Oak in the early 70s, he experimented with Hearts combining both the Africa cup and the league in order to maintain the intrinsic quality of the league but the experiment failed.

In 1972, Hearts returned from an Africa Cup assignment in Nigeria and within 24 hours lined up for a national league home match at Accra Stadium and lost.

It has long been an unwritten national policy to sacrifice the league for international matches and so in 1977 the league was turned into a special one round contest to make room for Ghana’s hosting of the 11th Cup of Nations in 1978.

Suspension of the league has been a normal practice and it reached its apogee in 1987. The competition in question started on Feb 21 and took a long break on March 15 to make room for the qualifying stages of both the African Cup of Nations and the All African Games.

After Ghana had been eliminated in both tournaments by Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire respectively, the league resumed on May 2 only to suffer another break after four matches; this time, to give the Black Stars sufficient time to prepare for the Seoul Olympic Games.

The league took off again on August 9 after all outstanding matches had been cleared ending on November18 which must be a wonder to Ghanaian football fans why outstanding matches could be so conveniently arranged in the English premiership without any club raising any objection.

For the attention of Coach Papic, the 1988-89 league was stopped by a court injunction just as it was gathering momentum and it took several weeks before the mess was cleared. A supporter of Cape Coast Venomous Vipers had challenged at the Cape Coast High Court as to the eligibility of Accra Standfast’s inclusion in the league. See that!

The1990-91 league is on record as the most disrupted in four decades. The league broke off on Dec 9, 1990 after only four matches, resumed on Dec 23 and after two matches broke off again till Jan 20, 1991. There was another break after the 8th round to make way for the Black Stars international assignments.

The competition resumed after a three- week break on Feb. 24 and was halted again on March 24 after five matches. The remaining two fixtures to end the round were played on April 14 and 21. And so the 15 match first round which began on Nov 18. 1990, officially ended on April 24 1991- a period of 23 weeks.

The second round which started on May 19 suffered a similar fate with a three month suspension because of the Black Starlets involvement in the Junior World Cup and it eventually ended on Nov 24.

The 1993 league which started on Jan 17 was suspended for nearly ten weeks to enable the Black Stars prepare for the World Cup qualifying matches and the Satellites for the African championships in Mauritius and the FIFA Coca -Cola Junior World Cup in Australia.

It is for the sake of Mr. Papic that I have enumerated all these incidents to show to the Serbian that in Ghana that is how we run our league. I encourage him to continue with his team building exercise but should not expect any favours from our authorities He should not be discouraged because this sporting world is full of many inexplicable things.

Cheers and keep loving sports.