Never piss off Tony Yeboah

Gary Stevens Age : 30 Joined : 24 Jul 2007 Posts : 1798

This month our regular columnist Peter Ndlovu recalls an unsavoury
incident from the African Cup of Nations.
"Things have been quiet this month so when I sat down to write this
article my mind went blank. Although the following tale has very little
to do with the game of football, fans will still find it quite
entertaining.
It is from the 2006 African Nations Cup in Egypt. We had just played our
final group game, ending on a high by beating a strong Ghana side but
still crashing out of the tournament. At the hotel that night we decided
to have a few drinks and toast to our victory. I had invited my friend
Tony Yeboah along (fans of English football will remember him from his
highly successful period with Leeds United) as he had been watching the
match.
The lads started giving Tony a lot of stick for his country's loss,
especially our head coach Charles Mhlauri. Tony was taking it quite
gracefully but, as a proud Ghanaian, I could sense his patience was
wearing thin. Nevertheless, the drinks kept flowing and so did the
jokes.
It came to the end of the night and some of the lads had disappeared to
bed, most notably our coach and Tony. Now during the whole tournament
Charles had personally entered the hotel rooms of our most lazy players
(Benjani was the worst) and pulled them out of bed in the morning to get
ready for training so myself and a couple of the other lads decided to
repeat the routine on him. We got the keys from reception and seven of
us bundled into his hotel room at 4 a.m. To our horror it was not
Charles who we found in bed, it was Tony Yeboah. The worst part was that
he was having sex with Charles' wife!
I quickly rounded the boys up and ushered them out of the room,
frantically hoping to keep a lid on the situation. After all, it was I
who invited Tony to the party! We found Charles in one of the hotel
bathrooms. He had had far too much to drink and crashed out.
The next morning, at breakfast, I quizzed Tony about what happened and
he delivered a line which I will remember all my life:
"When a man insults my country I insult him, by taking his woman"
Charles did eventually find out about the incident and I think he
separated from his wife for a period. The last I heard though was that
they are back together and he's now coaching in the USA.
The moral of the story is never to piss off Tony Yeboah!"
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The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It is nothing of the kind. The game is about glory. It is about doing things in style, with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.