Nii Odartey Lamptey, a former Black Stars forward, has revisited the 1992 Africa Cup of Nations drama and blamed Ghana’s unsuccessful campaign in Senegal on the beef between Abedi Pele and Odartey Lamptey.
Odartey Lamptey claimed on the Ernest Bruce Smith show that Ghana would have won the trophy if things had been amicable between the two players.
Despite the fact that Tony Yeboah was his roommate, Odartey said that he remained neutral in the power struggle.
“I was with Tony who was my roommate because I was an Ashanti boy. When it comes to professional, I was in Europe with Abedi others. The problem was that everybody wanted to be a leader and that caused us the tournament. That thing caused our downfall. If Abedi was in the final, we would have won it. On the pitch they were cool but off the pitch, it was different. “
Numerous descriptions of the events in 1992 that led to one of the largest disputes in Black Stars history have been used to tell the same story over and over again.
Speaking about it in 2017, Tony Yeboah claimed that the late captaincy change had a negative impact on the team’s locker room and led to Ghana’s loss to Ivory Coast in the championship game.
”Nothing went wrong among the players during the 1992 tournament. It was the officials who were not honest to the players and that affected our performance on the pitch,” Yeboah told Graphic Sports.
”However, just before the match, our coach Otto Pfister told us in the dressing room that he had just been given a letter from Accra, indicating that the captain’s band should rather be given to Tony Baffoe.
”Everybody was shocked to hear that news, so some of the key players were very disturbed and came to console me that I should not worry.
”But I told them not to worry about the treatment meted out to me but rather focus on the match and put up their best.
”There was no transparency and honesty among our officials, and this eventually affected our play on the pitch. In football, any trivial thing can affect a team’s performance, and I can say that the action of officials in 1992 was the main cause of our failure to win the trophy for Ghana,” he added.
