The Brave Barefoot Believers
73 years ago, a group of footballers from the Gold Coast, now Ghana, went on a tour of the UK — a move that would subsequently determine the course of Ghanaian football history, writes Fiifi Anaman
The weather was wet. It was windy and chilly. The sky was grey. It was Liverpool in August, just before autumn, and they had just arrived.
They were a group of footballers and officials from the Gold Coast, as pre-independent Ghana was known. “It is rather cold this morning and the team is feeling slightly chilled,” said the delegation leader, Richard ‘Lion Heart’ Akwei, who had ran football in the Gold Coast since the 1930s. “But they will soon settle down.”
The players, all amateurs, were in their overcoats against the cold. They were a 20-man-strong squad, the best footballers in the Gold Coast, and they had arrived for a four-week tour of the UK, where they were to play 10 matches as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain.
They had travelled 3000 miles in thirteen days, on board the ship “MV Apapa”, where they had regularly exercised on deck ahead of a demanding month ahead. “It was a very pleasant voyage,” Akwei added. “Everyone enjoyed it to the fullest.”
The tour, occurring just six years after World War II, was a big deal for the national team, named Gold Coast XI, formed just a year earlier. It would eventually prove to be the first major watershed in Ghana’s football history.
After being met by English FA reps, the lads relaxed at their hotel in Liverpool for the rest of the day. Later, they caught a night boat to Belfast, where they were to play their first game the next day, August 14, against a Northern Irish Amateur XI.
They were going to play barefoot — or as they called it, on “ten toes”. This was the footballing culture in the Gold Coast for most of the 48 years since the sport had first been introduced to the West African nation.
And so during the game at the Oval in Belfast, the feet of the Gold Coast footballers were bandaged with sock tape, their ten toes exposed, as they played against a side fully-clad in boots.
It was a disaster.
Of course, it was bound to be. And, in the end, it wasn’t only because they played barefoot.
Fifteen minutes to the end of the game, and with his team losing 5–2, Gold Coast XI goalkeeper, the young T.G Wilberforce, charged off his line to challenge an Irish center forward for an air-borne ball. The duo clashed and crashed to the ground. Crushed, Wilberforce couldn’t get up. He was hurt, heavily, and his howling was heard all around the Oval. Play halted for 10 minutes.
“I was horrified with the sight of Wilberforce lying motionless on the ground with a broken right leg,” C.K Gyamfi, a member of the team, remembered in his autobiography, The Black Star. “In a gesture of grief, I raised both my hands and rested them on top of my head, letting out a piercing cry of my own. I had never seen an injury that serious.”
Luckily, one of the Northern Irish players, M’Laughlin, was a doctor. He quickly gave Wilberforce first aid, supporting his broken leg with an improvised splint made out of a flagpole provided by one of the linesmen.
While he was being stretchered off to a waiting ambulance, Wilberforce drew sympathetic applause from across the ground. Though in pain, he smiled, raised his head, and waved his hand in acknowledgement.
Wilberforce was later described by the press as “agile and fearless”, having put in a “great display”.
That rave review had been a microcosm of the entire team’s performance.
It was the worst possible start for the Gold Coasters, who had to leave Wilberforce behind in Belfast to continue their tour.
“His injury really traumatized the group,” C.K Gyamfi wrote.
It really did, as the team would go on to lose seven of their remaining nine matches.
But don’t feel sorry, as that wasn’t the entire story. That record did not do them justice at all.
For a young team that was playing for the first time outside of their country, battling barefoot against unfamiliar and uncomfortable cold, ruined by rare rain and slippery surfaces, they managed to win two out of ten games, scoring 25 goals in the process. This was impressive.
Indeed, the Daily Graphic observed that the team was undone by “wet weather and treacherous pitches”. As one of the players complained, “We can get a grip on our hard, bare grounds at home, but your grass makes it very slippery for us.”
Observing the team’s games, Captain D.H Holley, the English football administrator who had led a Nigerian delegation of footballers on a similar UK tour in 1949, wrote that the weather had been “most unfavorable” for the Gold Coasters.
“The amount of rain that has fallen since the tourists arrived has been more than usual for this time of year,” Holley wrote. “To a team playing in the UK without boots, this is a very serious handicap, one that the Nigerian team did not have to bear.”
The pace-setting Nigerian team, who preferred to play in boots on soft grounds and barefoot on hard grounds, had played in nine matches, losing five of them, winning twice and drawing the rest.
Holley, who surprisingly rated the Gold Coasters above the Nigerians, believed Wilberforce’s intense injury at the start of the tour had “upset” the team, affecting their subsequent showings.
It was thus no surprise that the first game the Gold Coasters won — their eighth game on the tour against Athenian League in Bromley, England — was one that saw Wilberforce welcomed back to the side, although watching from the stands.
In crutches, he had recovered a bit and had flown in from Belfast, after which he had been picked up by Sir Stanley Rous, the English FA Secretary soon to become FIFA President, to the game.
A press report said “the sight of their injured colleague (Wilberforce) inspired them (Gold Coast XI) to greater efforts.”
They won 5–4.
The talent of the team was evident right from their first game in Belfast. A press report stated: “It was evident from their display that they had an excellent conception of the finer points of the game.”
In their next game against Northern Irish side Cliftonville, which they lost 4–2, they “gave another excellent display of cultured football”.
Next up, in front of 17,000 fans in a game against an amateur XI of Ireland, which they lost 4–3, they had their opponents “well beaten in the finer touches of the game” and gave a “grand display”, losing by “more than a share of bad luck”.
Against Lovells Athletic, which saw them lose 5–3, the Gold Coasters exhibited “a fine display of ball control” and their keeper displayed “brilliant style” with “great agility”.
In their game against Romford, which had them beaten 2–1. they “beat them (their opponents) for speed”, offered “first class entertainment” and “only fell short when it came to finishing”.
Again, against Walthamstow Avenue FC, a game they lost 2–1, they showed they could “come up smiling after the hardest tackle” from their boots-wearing opponents.
In other games, the team “left onlookers amazed” and their “juggling was pretty to watch”. The praise was profuse.
Individually, the team’s stars shone too.
Defender Chris Briandt, who became captain of the side in the middle of the tour, after regular captain Tim Darbah was dramatically demoted and dropped, once struck a free kick in their game against Romford. That ball, which “went like a bullet”, was the game’s “biggest surprise”. “There can be few players in Britain who could kick a dead ball so hard even with boots on,” the report marveled.
James Adjaye, the team’s playmaker, was also hailed. After the game against Cliftonville, the press wrote that Adjaye “with all things being equal, could hold his own among the best inside forwards in England”.
Then there was striker C.K Gyamfi, “star of the Gold Coast’s forward line”, who turned out to be the team’s top scorer with six goals. Gyamfi’s “clever dribbling and body swerving had the crowd roaring” all through the tour, earning him the nickname “Cheeky Charlie”.
Despite the daring displays, it was clear that the team was losing games because they were lacking something critical. True, Holley said they had had “atrocious luck”, but reporters also observed a lack teamwork and tactics.
After their first game, a newspaper said sarcastically that the team’s positioning was “most interesting”, going on to describe how the team, playing without a coach, had haphazardly lined up on the pitch.
Against a representative team from the Isthmian League, one of the best amateur leagues in England, the Gold Coasters were humiliatingly hammered 10–1 on a rain-soaked pitch. The press noted that “though clever individually, they lacked cohesiveness”.
According to Holley, defenders had an “anywhere will do” mentality with the ball, and when attacking, skied the ball goalward without aiming for players. Attackers were passing directly to themselves rather than “slipping the ball into space for the player to run to”. Infront of goal, they were “tip-tapping”. It was clear they did not have a coach to strum up strategy.
Unlike the Nigerians two years earlier, who received a coach named John Finch to help them right from the start of their tour, the Gold Coasters had to suffer through many losses and lessons without a coach. This was a “mistake,” according to Holley, one which would soon be rectified when a coach from the English FA, David Wall, was assigned to guide the team.
Granted, the Gold Coasters seemed congenitally talented, Wall admitted. “It is of no use teaching these fellows ball play,” he said.
“They are all experienced footballers and their ball play is good for most part,” he continued, adding: “I have put most of my efforts into teaching them from a blackboard, showing them tactical methods of defense and attack. I have tried to teach them to make the best possible use of their skill with the ball against tactics employed by such teams as they are likely to meet.”
Wall steered the team to their two wins, 5–4 against Athenian League and 4–3 against Barnet FC, while losing their last game 6–3 to Marine AFC.
Throughout the tour, the Gold Coasters became a heroic hit among the British, hosted in homes and halls for parties and dinners, as well as treated to tours off-the-pitch. They endeared themselves to the thousands of fans who witnessed them live, and the many more who watched their games on television.
Indeed, after their game at Romford, most of the English crowd stayed behind to interact with them, awed by their output. Many school boys also reportedly tracked them to their dressing rooms, asking for autographs.
It was almost the same for the Nigerians two years earlier — they had also impressed the British public with their performances.
In fact, the inevitable juxtaposition of the Nigeria and Gold Coast UK tours, the sentiments of who had done better, would go on to forge the roots of a rivalry between both countries, culminating in the establishment of the ‘Jalco’ Cup — annual match throughout the 50s pitching the two Anglophone West African countries against each other.
The first edition of the Jalco Cup occurred in October 1951, just weeks after the Gold Coast returned from their tour, with the Nigerians winning 5–0. The Cup would go on to become prestigious fixture, defining West African football and football in Sub Saharan Africa at large, evolving to become what is today known as the Jollof Derby.
After the Gold Coast’s tour, E.B Wallace Johnson, a member of the team, remained in the UK. The Sierra Leonean-born Johnson, who was then a trainee reporter at the Daily Graphic and had stayed in the UK to study photographic engraving, joined London amateur league side Hendon, becoming one of the first, if not the first, African to play a UK amateur league.
Goalkeeper T.G Wilberforce would some years later also return to the UK to study electronic engineering in Belfast, using the opportunity to play for Northern Irish side Cliftonville, whom the Gold Coast team had played in 1951. As for the Nigerians, Teslim ‘Thunder’ Balogun, a member of their 1949 touring team and a tireless tormentor of the Gold Coast in the Jalco Cup, returned to England to play football in 1955.
Before their first game of the tour, Gold Coast delegation leader Richard Akwei was optimistic. “We hope to give all the teams we meet a good game,” he said. “And we mean to learn as much as we can from the tour.”
And that is exactly what they did.
The team did defiantly give every opponent a good game, and ended up learning so much from the tour, lessons that would eventually revolutionize Ghanaian football.
C.K Gyamfi and Christ Briandt bought and brought boots back to Ghana and started the culture of wearing them for matches. Although they initially faced resistance, the boots culture was properly propagated in 1953, when Asante Kotoko became the first club to feature an entire starting eleven wearing boots.
In 1956, Richard Akwei would take a cue from his experience of the amateur league systems in the UK to finally organize the Gold Coast’s first national league. The next year, UK football superstar Sir Stanley Matthews would tour Ghana, and year after that, Ghana would hire its first national coach, an Englishman named George Edward Ainsley.
In the summer of 1961, exactly 10 years after the UK tour, Ghana’s new national team, the Black Stars, would go on a historic tour of Eastern Europe, this time featuring boots, a coach (Hungary’s Josef Ember), and many match wins (eight out of 12).
Stars of the UK tour — Chris Briandt, James Adjaye and CK Gyamfi — would go on to form the core of the Gold Coast XI side that would dominate West African football in the 50s, and all three would go on to train as professional coaches in Germany.
C.K Gyamfi, more markedly, would go on to become Ghana’s first black coach in 1962, further going on to win three of the country’s four Afcon titles from the dugout.
