I cringed hard watching the Black Stars of Ghana draw 1-1 against Chad at Ndjamena in a game everyone hotly tipped them to win.

If for nothing else, the 2026 FIFA World Cup was staring them in the face, with Ghanaians very critical of securing qualification to the World Cup.

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Otto had a chunk of his regulars (Jordan Ayew, Mohammed Kudus, Thomas Partey, and Antoine Semenyo) available for selection, so by no means would he have any excuse to blame personnel for why the team failed to live up to expectations in faraway Ndjamena.
Since knowing Otto Addo as the Black Stars head coach, he has experimented with several games, marshalling personnel to suit his tactics; some have worked(five wins in six prior matches), while others have not.
I picked some observations from the game.

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Otto Addo has come under intense pressure many times, and as such, this game won’t spare him any of the pleasantries. For a team that needed a win badly to bolster their chances of securing World Cup qualifications, this was a game that had a lot riding on it. In his press conference, where he remarked that his team was not going to underrate their opponents (CHAD), they did exactly the opposite of everything he said in that presser.

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The other thing I will touch on is his game management skills, which don’t equate to the relentless pacing about on the touchline. I feel that if he had invested a lot in his in-game management, that would have been very crucial for the outcome of the game, as seen in the lethargy.
For a team that has been berated over the past for its lack of motivation and willpower, playing for the country of their birth, one would have expected the players to play a little above their normal weight levels against Chad, but that wasn’t what we saw in the game.

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In the first half, they could have willingly buried the game by not more than three goals to the good, but a myriad of missed opportunities meant that they closed the first half with just a goal in the bag.
In the second half, they casually strolled the length and breadth of the park with no real sense of urgency. It was as though the game meant nothing to them, but trust you me, this was a game where a win would have aided qualification chances for the technical team to refresh the squad against Mali in Accra, but I guess the players may know something we don’t know, reason they churned such a lackluster performance for Ghanaians to consume on a working Thursday.

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I have always known that injecting fresh legs into a game is a way of giving your team that superiority factor it needs to stay and dominate the game. If there is an area that needs working on, it’s the area of substitution. Otto introduced fresh limbs with thirteen minutes to end proceedings, Kamaldeen and Bonsu, which I feel should have come a bit earlier, considering how the pair progressed the ball quickly, threatened the opposition defense with a lot of marauding runs and shots. Earlier substitutions could have injected the urgency and dynamism the team lacked.

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In the aftermath of this draw against Chad, there has been a lot of talk in town. The politics surrounding the Black Stars got even more intense and keener. Hopefully, the game against Mali will provide sweet tidings for the home folks.