Twenty games into the 2022/23 Ghana Premier League season, Accra Hearts of Oak and Asante Kotoko are tied on number of points (31), wins (8), draws (7) and losses (5).
Before they met for the first time this year, for their Matchweek 20 clash, Kotoko had a slight advantage, three points and one win clear of Hearts, their arch-nemesis. The Phobians had won just one of their preceding five league games, and defeat in their last outing before the duel with Kotoko, to city rivals Accra Great Olympics, had left fans especially incensed.
Many of them considered it the last straw, conclusive proof that head coach Slavko Matic isn’t at all the right fit for the club. And so they revolted, making their stance sufficiently clear. The club hasn’t given in to pressure to fire Matic and appease the supporters, but that parting of ways might not be too far off.
In the meantime, the fanbase has gone ahead to make Matic know he’s no longer welcome at the club. A number of supporters physically restrained him from holding a training session a day after the Olympics game, and that encounter was eventually enough to deny him a place on the bench when Kotoko visited.
That game promised so much, ninety minutes of work for the reward of 180.
Assistant coach David Ocloo, calling the shots in Matic’s stead, wasn’t overawed by the occasion and delivered just what was required. A 1-0 victory fetched Hearts not just three points, but also secured the President’s Cup for a second successive year at the expense of the club Ocloo last worked for.
Kotoko, to a Hearts side in crisis, even by narrow margins, had fallen. Hearts’ pre-match plight regardless, only the most naive Kotoko fan would have thought their team was going to have a field day, as the Porcupine Warriors themselves have been in far from peak shape.
Actually, Hearts and Kotoko went into this match with identical records thus far in 2023: three wins apiece from 11 games. The only reason you hadn’t seen supporters of the latter up in arms, too, was probably that two of those victories have been achieved by huge margins, giving a relative yet very false sense of well-being.
Or, perhaps, it’s simply a case of Kotoko’s supporters not being, as they say, “angry enough”… but, really, why shouldn’t they be?
Hearts, if anything, are in a better place, even if only slightly. They’re two points better in the league than they were at this stage last season. And while they’re out of the FA Cup of which the club are the holders, they already have silverware — minor, yes, but silverware regardless — in the bag.
Kotoko, on the other hand, aren’t guaranteed a trophy this season. They’ve missed out on the President’s Cup, as implied earlier, and are also out of the gunning for the FA Cup, a prize they last won six years ago. In the league, they’re five points off top spot, which they occupied this time last season on 13 more points than they currently have (en route to being crowned champions).
And that drop-off, startling as it is, is squarely on head coach Seydou Zerbo.
The Burkinabe may not have had the luxury of a full pre-season with the Kotoko team he inherited from Dr. Prosper Narteh Ogum ahead of this campaign, but what he enjoyed was still more than Matic — parachuted in to replace predecessor Samuel Boadu when the season was already well underway — got.
It could be argued that the team Zerbo took charge of had been stripped of some of its title-winning components — including left-back Ibrahim Imoro, centre-back Abdul-Ganiu Ismail, midfielder Salifu Mudasiru, and topscorer Franck Mbella Etouga — in the transfer market.
Still, the recruitment done to replace these key personnel was more than decent, and the core of the existing team remained formidable enough to reasonably pursue the club’s targets. All Zerbo has succeeded in doing, however, is make the team add up to significantly less than the sum of its parts.
Under his oversight, Kotoko have been knocked out of two competitions — not counting the one-off President’s Cup game — and their league title defence is faltering, though not quite over. Not many of the performances — never mind the results — have been convincing, with Zerbo once too often guilty of attempting to place the blame for setbacks on factors beyond his control.
“Yes, we were defeated,” he said in the aftermath of the recent FA Cup exit in Dormaa, “but the referee’s effort won the match for Aduana.”
And following the latest blow, dealt by Hearts, Orlando Wellington, effectively Zerbo’s No.2 and a man who is responsible — literally — for getting the French-speaking trainer’s thoughts across as an unofficial interpreter, echoed that sentiment.
“Referees have their part to play, players have their own part to play, but as a referee you have to be fair at the centre,” Wellington started, before getting to his point.
“Hearts of Oak scored an offside goal and the referee denied us a clear penalty.”
That’s certainly a sign of a technical team clutching at straws, rather than genuinely looking for areas to improve; and how long could that be permitted to continue?
Says Nana Kwame Dankwa, a top executive of Kotoko’s official supporters’ group: “Let’s review coach Zerbo’s performance; if there is no improvement in his performance, we must let him go.”
When that review is to be carried out is uncertain, but, clearly, the Kotoko faithful is unwilling to exert on the club’s administrators the sort of pressure to get rid of the coach that is presently inching Matic ever closer to the exit at Hearts.
And with Zerbo being freshly bereaved, having sadly lost his 10-year-old son only Monday, the club and its fans would, quite understandably, see reason in being sympathetic towards him.
Should things continue this way, however, tolerance and empathy — qualities usually not in abundant supply among Kotoko’s demanding supporters — could soon run out.
Enn Y. Frimpong — Ink & Kicks
