It immediately raised questions about what the direction of Kotoko was.
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‘Coaches are hired and fired at anytime’. This cliché is synonymous with every football fan. But the reality is that coaches at stable clubs do not have to face this uncertainty. Kotoko has not been a stable club for sometime now, but the dismissal of Michael Osei will come as a major shock to many.
And it was not as if Osei did not make progress with the side. This is a coach who took over a team in crises with players underperforming, yet successfully transformed them into a genuinely exciting side.
But this is all too familiar with Ghanaian clubs. The quest for instant success has seen clubs adopt a ruthless habit of hiring and firing their coaches at the least chance. First it was Hearts of Oak who dismissed three coaches in the space of a year, but now Kotoko has followed suit with a decision that could soon prove costly.
And it is no surprise that both clubs have lost their dominance in Africa. Instead of giving a coach time to build his own team, both clubs would rather have him fired after just two months if results do not reflect.
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Such drastic changes have made sure that the kind of stability required by a coach to build a winsome side has eluded both Hearts and Kotoko.
The former’s decision to dismiss David Duncan and Kenichi Yatsuhashi when they were midway through their projects is what has accounted for their eight year drought without a league trophy.
Kotoko might just be repeating the same mistake with Osei’s dismissal. The fans have still not forgotten the crises the erstwhile Opoku Nti administration plunged the club into when they dismissed Didi Dramani without any justifiable cause. And the newly formed Dr. Kwame Kyei board couldn’t have started on a worse note with such an unpopular decision.
More intriguing is the fact the new coach tasked to lead the team – Zdravko Logarusic – is not necessarily a better tactician. The Croat is a coach who attracts controversy wherever he goes. He was asked to step aside by Ashanti Gold after leading the club to just two places above the relegation zone. His reign at King Faisal was also ended after misunderstandings with the club’s hierarchy. And though he won the Kenyan Premier League with Gor Mahia in the 2012/13 season, he was still sacked the year after for financial disagreements and poor attitude towards work.
Osei might be inexperienced, but the feats chalked by him cannot be understated.
With Kotoko languishing at the buttom of the league after the ill-fated spell of David Duncan, Osei took over and transformed the club into title challengers. And in spite of the criticisms that came his way after the club endured a six-match winless run in the second round, Kotoko mamaged to finish just five-points adrift of league champions, Wa All Stars.
Zdravko Logarusic is a well traveled coach with a far better CV than Osei, but demoting the latter to the junior side was nothing else than total disrespect.
For a coach that had built a rapport with the players, it would have been better to keep him – if even as an assistant – to serve as a guide to the new coach.
Osei knows Kotoko inside out; having played as a player for the Porcupine Warriors, and having him on side would have offered Logarusic a good transition.
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But now he is no more with the first team. And only the club will lose if Logarusic does not succeed.
The club is still paying for the wrongful dismissal of Didi Dramani – who won back-to-back league titles with Kotoko – and could soon be paying for the blunder of dismissing Osei too.