Afriyie Acquah's Nine Lives

The powerhouse midfielder has charted an unusual path to a successful career in European football

When the stories of how Ghanaian players made it to Europe are told, they come with a fair amount of fairy tale servings. They are tales of dreams coming true. Of chance encounters and messianic figures who take talented footballers they have scouted abroad, and give them a chance at the elite level.

That is not really the story of Afriyie Acquah.

His arrival in European football was a matter of when, not if. He was too talented and well known not to arouse attention. He had already returned home from a productive trip to Northern Ireland courtesy of the juvenile team he played for in Sunyani. He was awaiting his papers to secure a permanent move. But one act would change all that.

“My academy owner had brought a large container of football equipment to Sunyani from the United Kingdom. It was to serve the players in the team, but we soon realized that one of the coaches was skimming and selling off the equipment. You could see the jerseys everywhere in town, but the players in the team were not getting the kits. I had just returned from Europe and so I had more than enough in equipment. The story was different for my teammates. I therefore advised them to also find a way of getting access to the kits in the container that were being sold off.”

They took his advice. The story of the misuse of equipment in the container would reach the owner in London. His response was to file a complaint with the police in the area. Anybody who had anything to do with the matter was to be detained and questioned by the police. Including young Acquah.

“ Somebody told the police that I had told my teammates to also take some of the kits for themselves so they started looking for me. The police station was very close to where I lived at the time.It was also close to the Victoria Park where we played so most of the police officers knew me. The information was passed on to my grandmother and mother that I was a person of interest in the matter of the missing equipment. To avoid me getting arrested, she called a Sunyani based football agent and tasked him to bring me to Accra. He obliged”.

Hiding in Accra, Acquah was added to a group of young players the agent was prepping for a sporting tour of Italy. He excelled during the tour and caught the eye of Palermo. The rest they say is history.

Afriyie Acquah is 28 years old now. An experienced campaigner who has played in Italy, Germany and now Turkey. To be more accurate he has played for eight teams in nine years. He is a full Ghana international. He is also a favourite of the tabloids. His relationships the subject of rumours and analysis on the daily. They don’t faze him though. He has very few regrets about how his career on and off the pitch has turned out. He has earned the right to be satisfied.

Acquah comes from perhaps the most fertile football area in Ghana. The Bono region is home to some of the most illustrious names to emerge in Ghanaian football. Dan Owusu. Kwasi Owusu. George Arthur. It is also home to some of the fiercest football rivalries in the country. Acquah was raised on stories of these football gladiators and the games they contested in the heart of the region, Sunyani. His grandmother is linguist to the queen mother of Sunyani. His mother operated an eatery in the city.

Area 1 was his playground.

“Area 1 is like the main part of the city.Everything operates around this area.The football park is also in the middle of this part of the city.It is where I honed my craft as a player.”

Although Acquah has found fame and fortune as an athletic defensive midfielder, his early days on the playground were spent as a multi positional maven. His favourite position however was number 10.

“ I always did my best work in that position as a kid. In Sunyani everyone knew me as a creative player, although I remember captaining my colts team,Young Goldfields to a national title as a center back. We beat a team from Accra called Zenaps. They had Daniel Amartey and Clifford Aboagye among others.”

That win elevated his status even more within Area 1 and Sunyani and also ended his run in the colts section of football. It was all too clear he was miles ahead of other players in that category and typical of the Acquah story, there was nothing straightforward about the way he joined the team he would become internationally synonymous with. Glentoran Academy.

The widely publicized story of how the east Belfast team came to have an outpost in West Africa has been regaled several times. Founded by Christoper Forsyth, a Sunyani native who was adopted from the streets by a Northern Irish family, its purpose was to help street children through football.

As established already though, Acquah was no street kid and he was not even meant to be at the tryouts for the first generation of recruits for the team. He had rented out his football boots the day before to his friend for fifty cedis.

“I was helping my mother at her eatery that morning when my uncle showed up inquiring why I was not with other kids at the Coronation Park, where the tryouts were being held. He was upset with my mother for giving me chores when an opportunity like that had come up, but she also had no idea about the tryouts. I told my uncle I had even rented out my boots so I could not participate. He still dragged me there.”

The try outs had ended when Acquah and his uncle arrived. Two sets of eleven had been picked to vie for the openings available at the academy. One included his friend, equipped with Acquah’s boots. It looked like his chance had gone. His uncle, however, was not that easily discouraged.

“My uncle was quite well known and also helped in securing the park for the tryouts. He told the Forsyth about how talented I was and how I had just won a national title for the region in Tamale. He agreed to give me some minutes. The only problem was I still did not have a pair of boots. I could not collect my boots from my friend because I had taken money for it”.

That problem was quickly solved by the scout of Glentoran. He found Acquah a pair of worn Nike’s from his car. He would make his appearance in the second half.

That second half was enough to convince the scouts that they had hit the mother lode. They spoke to his mother and she gave her blessings to his switch to the academy and a trip to Belfast. It would account for only his second ever visit to the nation’s capital, Accra.

“After I joined the academy, I moved to Tema Community 5. The only time I had been in Accra was a few years earlier during the national Milo U-12 tournament, but this was different. I was there for three months as they did the paperwork to get me a visa. It is how I ended up spending time in Northern Ireland”.

There is genuine joy in Acquah’s voice as he shares these stories. It’s been a long time since he has had the chance to talk about his path to a professional football career.

“There a lot of young players out there who always think it’s just about having talent. It’s about a lot more. Maybe in these stories they can pick up lessons. I came to Europe very young and it tested me. I was homesick a lot. Then there were also the technical aspects of the game I had to learn just to survive and make a career.”

Those hard lessons were taught and learnt in Palermo.

The Sicilian capital is a place of myth and legend. Mario Puzo’s Godfather ensured that in popular culture at least. A hard, unforgiving land, that is designed to make men out of boys.

When Palermo signed Acquah after watching him excel at the Trofeo Nereo Rocco in 2009, he was a budding playmaker. Intelligent with the ball and powerful for his age, he could drive teams like very few players could. His dreams of becoming the next Abedi Pele or Stephen Appiah were dashed once his signature was secured. The technical team at Palermo did not want a creative force. They wanted a destructive one and they were going to engineer Acquah into that force.

“The coach told me from the onset that I had to change my style and learn to play defensive midfield. My days of training were simply learning how to play two touch football. It was control and pass. This was an everyday process for almost two months. It would be done during and after training. It was difficult because that process was also meant to cause a change in personality. It took my carefree intuition from me and I was resisting it. It took the head coach, who walked up to me and said my only chance of making it to the Serie A was to adapt to the new position. Eventually I got used to it.”

The on pitch acclimatization did not solve the loneliness conundrum though, and the Christmas of 2009 almost saw it end his stay in Palermo.

“We lived in a dormitory those days. What we call a club house in Ghana. It was my first Christmas in Italy and all my teammates had left to celebrate the festivities with their families. I was the only player from the entire juvenile team left at the residence and these places are guided by strict rules. You cannot go out past a certain time. When they brought me food one evening I just started weeping. It was too much. I didn’t know anybody in the city. Once the holidays ended, I went straight to management and told them of my desire to return to Ghana immediately. I could not stay. At least with my mother and grandmother, I could always get a decent meal to eat with all the meat I wanted. They called my agent, Oliver Arthur and he calmed me down. After that I just focused on the football”.

His new found focus led to a breakthrough season in 2010 with the star studded senior team. This was the era of Miccoli, Pastore and Cavani. The kid from Area 1 in Sunyani had finally landed on the big stage. National attention was not far behind.

Acquah has played almost forty games for Ghana since his debut in 2012. It has brought fame and infamy in equal measure. He is fine with both sides of the coin. It is the burden of playing for the national team of Ghana. Everything action and inaction are scrutinized. He has good memories of his national career. And bad ones. None so more than the night of February 8 in Equatorial Guinea.

Called to Ghana’s national team for the African Cup of Nations by Avram Grant on the back of some outstanding performances while on loan at Parma, Acquah cemented his place in the team after earning a starting a berth in the second group game against Algeria. He did not look back as Ghana beat all comers to set up a dream final against regional rivals, Cote d’Ivoire.

A tense game between the two would go to a penalty shoot out. With Ghana at a significant advantage after the Ivorians had missed their first two kicks, Acquah was sent forth to ensure a certain victory for Ghana. It is a decision that is still the subject of intense debate in Ghana. Most fans have wondered why proven takers like Andre and his younger brother Jordan were not moved up at such a crucial time. Nobody Acquah as a penalty taker. He has a different opinion.

“I have personally not heard fans ask that, but Avram Grant knew what he was doing and all the players in the squad also knew my skill from the penalty spot. I never missed a kick at training. I am very good at penalties. In fact, when the Ivorians missed their second penalty, Grant changed the kicking order just so I could go and take that kick. I was confident in the approach to the kick but these things happen. I missed.”

The kick that was to crown his best performance in Ghana shirt ended in tragedy. Nobody even recalls that he was named man of the match in that final.

That miss still haunts him to this day.

“ I have still not watched that game. I remember when we returned to Ghana from Equatorial Guinea, I went out with my family to eat at a restaurant. When we entered the TV in the restaurant had the game on replay. I begged the restaurant manager to change the channel for me.”

There are other moments in his career that haunt him.Those that he struggles to explain to this day. None more so than his big money transfer to the Bundesliga………

READ PART 2