After which Fatau Dauda emerges and declares, “We know our mission here,” and adds, “with God everything is possible.” In the end, Justus Torsutsey’s first half strike for WAFA, however, condemned Legon Cities to a 1-0 defeat that afternoon and brought to a sudden halt their inspiring two-game winning streak. Afterwards, Legon Cities will go on to win their next three fixtures without conceding a single goal only to succumb to 2-0 and 2-1 losses in the subsequent two games.
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Flashy and sophisticated Legon Cities punch below their weight with mediocre 2020/21 campaign (Pulse Contributor’s Opinion)
In Legon Cities Diaries episode 1 - a half an hour film part of a series shot for the club’s TV to give fans a proper glimpse of the team’s match-day activities - as their fancy black bus screeches to a halt at the Shekinah Glory Hotel in Sogakope, the staff and players file out from the shuttle with a few of them waving two fingers in the air at the camera while mumbling inaudible words under their breath.
Legon Cities line up group picture
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To a certain telling degree, if you look closely and harder enough, you come to the realisation this has been the broader tale of this highly sophisticated club: a band of players punching below their weight, a well-stocked team for whom, for all their resources and off-field flamboyance, the title race and even the top four have escaped. Perhaps, on some forgiving level, you sense it would be unjust to demand that a club in such a state of flux should challenge for the Ghana Premier League.
Legon Cities are barely two years old. In the December of 2019, Wa All Stars, a club born out of the infamous former GFA president Kwesi Nyantakyi’s groundbreaking investments in the northern part of Ghana, was traded and then branded as Legon Cities. Accra Sports Stadium instead of the Wa Sports Stadium is now their home ground, and history still declares Legon Cities as 2016 Ghana Premier League winners.
Even so, for all their indispensable adjustments and adaptations, tweaks and fine tuning, it feels as though it’s almost criminal to see such a gaping mismatch between their fancy brand and sophistication, and the actual football they play during match-days. Results have been all too erratic – 10 wins, 13 losses, 9 draws – and they continue to average a goal per game while they’ve leaked 31 goals in 32 fixtures.
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In the first half of the season where they dangerously flirted with relegation, and were teetering on the brink of chaos, the management of Legon Cities where coerced to replace 52-year-old Bosnian coach Goran Barjakterevic with two-time Ghana Premier League winner Bashiru Hayford.
And after a largely turbulent beginning of his reign, Legon Cities forcefully crawled their way into mid-table obscurity. And yet, there’s still a lingering jeopardy that just as they once crawled out of chaos and into liberation, they could as well someway somehow find themselves in yet another precarious situation while the season hasn’t concluded.
“They[Hearts] did well, and I think we have sold a very beautiful game for Ghanaians,” Bashiru Hayford sharply remarked with his brown-lensed sunglasses hanging off his forehead in a post-match interview a few moments after Legon Cities had lost 2-1 to Hearts of Oak at the Accra Sports Stadium.
In Hayford’s very admission of Hearts of Oak’s superiority and taking comfort in his side’s ability to have played an entertaining game, he, in a way, also tacitly revealed Legon Cities’ own limitations: of the team’s inability to challenge the big boys, of the sense of inferiority that envelops them in these sort of big fixtures.
The Royals have picked up only four points out of twelve in all six home –and-away fixtures against the very elite teams in the league – Hearts, Kotoko, Olympics. Maybe this is a bit harsh, and maybe this doesn’t tell the story in its entirety. Yet, throughout the life span of the league, never at any one point have Legon Cities threatened to break into the top four. For all their hectic transfer activities prior to the commencement of the season, which saw them acquire the services of 11 new players and go on to add another 4 mid-season, perhaps it is only right they receive some criticisms for flattering to deceive.
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Asamoah Gyan, a 35-year-old whose physical state keeps deteriorating each passing day, has had his season blighted by recurring injuries which have constricted him to only six fixtures. Mathew Anim Cudjoe, a very promising prospect on loan from Asante Kotoko, is only a 17-year-old chap still battling with adolescent issues. Victorien Adebayor is back in the Ghana Premier League and his sublime free-kick the only Legon Cities goal in their 2-1 defeat to Hearts in Accra, couldn’t even inspire The Royals to a draw.
Currently, Legon Cities are thirteenth on the league table with 39 points, and only two points adrift of sixteenth–placed King Faisal, and are now closer to relegation than to the top eight with two games still left to play.
Maybe there’s hope for next season, maybe the pieces will align and stick together. Maybe this season will serve as a learning curve which would propel them to greater heights in the campaigns to come. But at present, Legon Cities, for all their laudable branding and structure, remain a mid-table club who by their own design find themselves in a distressing misfortune of having to escape relegation.
Bright Antwi
Pulse Contributors is an initiative to highlight diverse journalistic voices. Pulse Contributors do not represent the company Pulse and contribute on their own behalf
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