Gambia U-17 Lands Ghanaian Coach

If the words of Kebba Ceesay, the chairman of the GFA Technical Committee are anything to grasp at, a foreign coach is on its way to gaffer the U-17 national team. This comes almost a year before The Gambia hosts her first continental footy tournament, the U-17 CAF tournament to be staged here in 2005.

According to Ceesay, the said coach would hail from Ghana.

Telling this to Sports File last Monday, Ceesay said that the coach would officially take up team duties on June 02nd.

"With the U-20 team out of continental action, our main focus is now the U-17 team," he explained.

To put a good team in place, Ceesay revealed, a nationwide scouting campaign for talents would kick off next month, to be ably assisted by the GFA regional coaches posted in the regions and other local coaches.

"We would like to scout as most as talents as possible before the arrival of the U-17 coach," explained Ceesay.

On why the U-20 flopped against Sierra Leone in the CAF U-20 championship preliminaries, the GFA man blamed clubs for putting personal interest first. "They shunned national interest by calling their players for league matches when they were already in camp for national duties," he fumed, adding that the U-20 team coach Peter Bornu Johnson did not inform them about it.

"In the GFA rules and regulation, there is a clause which states that, any player who leave the camp without the consensus of the head coach or clubs withdraw their players from the national team, should be punished," he stated.

Ceesay took the whole team to the cleaners for their lack of commitment in the said game.