Something to make you go hmm! Part 2

5:47 PM Ellis 9 Comments

Accra - The story about the women's national team trip to La Cote D'Ivoire and the comments it drew here continues to create ripples within the Ghanaian basketball community. The latest addition has come from none other than the chairman of the GABBA , Mr Benjamin Yaw Sakyi Baaafi, who also served as the manager for the team on the trip.

In a conversation with him this morning after his morning work out at Lebanon House, he made it clear that even though the women did not perform well at all, he was not happy with some of the comments that were made on the story especially the one from Gasu. Siting the fact that he (Gasu) is a referee and belongs to the Ghana basketball family and knows how difficult it is to get funding to do things for basketball in Ghana. He also mentioned how several individuals had to sacrifice their time and money before this trip could come on.

"The women went to play for them to gain qualification to the AfroBasket 2011 to be held in June 2011" he said in his statement. He also sited that the GBBA saw this as an opportunity for Ghana to get an easy qualification since Nigeria did not bother to show up because they had already qualified. As a result La Cote D'Ivoire has qualified for both the All African games and Afrobasket 2011.

The GBBA had a lot of problems in the preparation for the trip, most pertinent amongst them being finance. He said some players also failed to honor the calling to the team and others were not able to make it because of other important engagements they had during the period of the trip. "Anybody who has followed the league over the years knows that this wasn't the best women's team that could have been put together, but there so many issues that prevented the GBBA from putting together the best possible team", the team manager added.

He ended his talk by saying that the GBBA and all of its stakeholders are going to soon start active preparations for next year's trip to Mali.

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