Grant emphasizes commitment to locally-based players

Ghana coach Avram Grant has reaffirmed his commitment to home-based players in his squad selection.

The Israeli coach who took the Black Stars job in December 2014 has recently come under a lot of flak for his continued absence from the country to monitor local talents especially during the period when the new season had not started.

Grant has mostly been away with excuses of player monitoring in Europe among others as leave holidays have come for scrutiny as he had sparsely monitored local games.

The assertion was further given prominence when his agent, Saif Rubie bizarrely claimed in an interview with the BBC that Grant's absence in the country of his employment was due to the poor quality of the First Capital Plus Premier League and its players.

But the former Chelsea coach has shot down Rubie's claims while dispelling concerns that he has turned his back on locally-based players.

Grant says there is no such classification as a local player or a foreign player when considering players for the national team and insists that his target is to build a solid national team with the best.

"For me there is no local or foreign player; my doors are opened to all. All of them are Ghanaian players who need to give everything for their country,” he told the Ghana FA website.

"It’s good that Ghanaians want me to be here. It’s very nice to hear that. But I need to do my job and my job is to do the best for the Black Stars. You know more than 90% of the players, when there are opportunities they go to play abroad, so they are playing abroad and I need to monitor them before we have official games and that’s what I did.

“I did one week vacation and I monitored players after that. During this time, I was at the draw for the World Cup with the GFA. I worked very hard to monitor the players as we did before the African Cup and before Mauritius,” Grant added in attempt to explain his recent two-month absence.

"I saw a few league games and two African cup game of Hearts of Oak and Kotoko and I saw some good players. But when every player that has a good offer from Europe or other continent is going to play away from Ghana, I’m going to see him.

“This doesn’t mean we don’t monitor the domestic league too. My assistants are here and we are in contact always.

“I saw some of the players here and I must say that they are giving everything; few of the young players have a good future. But to take a player now to the squad Black Stars, you need to be better than what we have,” Grant ended.

The Black Stars are set to play against Congo in a stadium-opening friendly on September 1 before engaging Rwanda in the 2017 Afcon qualifiers four days later.

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Story by Ghana/Stephen Amos