Certain principles have guided Carlos Queiroz’s nearly fifty-year career in football. The most important one: “Don’t lie to football”. The Mozambique-born coach recalls that it was one of the most important lessons taught to him by his father, Julio. It has stayed with him at every stage of his career. He is unabashedly honest when it comes to sharing his thoughts on the game he loves and how it should be played. He has done the same during career highs and lows, like his recent stint as head coach of Oman, where he agreed to part ways when he realised things were not going to work out. He was in charge for just 11 matches.
It has also dictated the decisions he has made as national team coach of South Africa, Portugal, Iran, Colombia, and now Ghana.
He doesn’t lie about how he likes the game to be played either. Criticised in 2013 over Manchester United’s defensive style, he quipped back in classic style:
“The game is simple. You lose the ball and you have to work to recover it, and when you have the ball you must attack, take a risk, play with personality.
“All great winning teams and champion teams, attacking teams, have great defensive approaches to the game.
“Look at other sports. In basketball, the great Chicago Bulls team was the best attacking team in their league, and won all their trophies in terms of their defensive approach to the game.
“The more and the better you defend, the more simple it becomes to attack.”
That still stands true for him, as he paraphrased this philosophy during his introductory press conference as Ghana’s coach on Thursday.
“For me, there is no defensive coach or other in football. I am a winning coach. To do that, we must recover the ball quickly when we lose it and create our chances when we have it.”
He will need this mantra more than ever in this four-month stint. Once one of the most feared national teams out of Africa, Ghana’s football has fallen on hard times. The team did not qualify for the recent AFCON in Morocco. Talk to the managers of the game in the country, and they make it sound like a blip rather than a pattern. The expectations ahead of the World Cup in the USA, Canada, and Mexico are still not modest. The Sports Minister has declared an intention to go deep in the tournament. Football administrators harbour similar dreams. To do otherwise would be to admit that they have not been good at their jobs over the last half-decade.
That is not to say there is no prospect of doing well. Queiroz obviously knows this, and it would have weighed heavily on his decision to take a difficult short-term job on short notice. As he kept mentioning during his Ghana presser (12 times in 15 minutes), his long experience means he can focus on the most important thing: winning. Queiroz knows there is winning potential with the Black Stars. He will not be judged on style or any other metric that modern football prides itself on during the World Cup. Like he said, “Ghana expects nothing but wins.”
To achieve that, he has one thing going for him that his predecessor, Otto Addo, didn’t: control. The obsessive need to control every aspect of the Black Stars and their activities meant that past coaches did not enjoy the run of the pasture in carrying out their tasks. Necessity and timing have come together to give Queiroz a precious gift in this regard. The excessive need to do well, coupled with the short time required to achieve that objective, means he will be allowed extreme freedom in his work. His methods will not be questioned, so long as they lead to a win in June.
The football federation has announced that it will keep the core of the technical team that helped the team qualify for the World Cup. That announcement was met with some shock by journalists, considering rumours that some technical team members, including John Painstil and Fatau Dauda, had been reassigned. Queiroz has been known to take a trusted assistant, Roger de Sa, on all his assignments. It is also instructive that he took pains to explain that his staff will have one side based in Accra, while the other side works from Europe. Power will rest with the side that works out of Europe.
The next four months will be a roller coaster ride of emotions for Queiroz, the players of the Black Stars, the media, and ultimately, the fans. Tighten your seat belt.
