African job is meant for Africans says SLFA boss
President of the Sierra Leone Football Association (SLFA) Madam Isha Johansen has said this is the time Africans should believe in their fellow Africans in handling footballs top job as some African coaches can do better than their European counterparts, all they need is the support in order for them to achieve their goals and dreams. She made this disclosure during an interview on British Broadcasting Cooperation (BBC) Sports World.
According to her, Africans can do as well as their European counterparts if they are well equipped, and there is no bias in selecting and inviting of players, she stated.
“Honestly, if I were to do a selection now, I would rather look at what we have on the ground,” said Johansen.
The iron lady further stressed that African coaches are ready to learn, they too want to get the abilities of the non-African coaches. All is left with their associations to empower them as a way to compete with others. Johansen cited that the records Europeans have with African teams is nothing good to write home about as compared to the Africans, pointing at Ahmed Shahater of Egypt, Steven Keshi with Nigeria and Togo, Alieu Cissee of Senegal, to name but of a few.
The SLFA boss maintained that the reason why African football veterans after retiring from football engage themselves in coaching, is to help to build a better national team for their country as they know when they have graduated they will have job in Africa and not in Europe. How many high leveled African coaches are coaching or have coached a European nation or club team in Europe? So this is a manifestation that it is now time for us to empower our local coaches.
I do believe Africans should be in charge of African teams as this is their rightful job and destination as we want to see the growth and increase in number of African coaches managing African national teams and clubs from now to 2025. Not like what we saw in the just concluded 2015 AFCON in Equatorial Guinea where only three African Coaches were there, said Johansen.
Meanwhile SLFA is currently interviewing six coaches shortlisted for the vacant national coach job of the national team; wherein among the six shortlisted, only one Sierra Leonean is among the five Europeans in the person of John Keister, who has been with the national 17, 20, 23 teams, and was an assistant coach for the national team, and head coach of local Premiership club FC Johanssen. As it stands of now, he is the only selection we have on the ground.
However pundits are of the view that Keister only played two games for the national team Leone Stars and was not successful where he has worked as a coach.
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