There’s a place in the round of 16 of the World Cup up for grabs when Ghana and Uruguay play in Al Wakrah on Friday but, for Africa’s Black Stars, there’s even more at stake.
It’s 12 years since their only other meeting, the quarterfinal of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, when Uruguay striker Luis Suarez deliberately stopped Dominic Adiyiah’s goal-bound header with his hands in the final minute of extra time. It triggered a sequence of events that ended with Ghana exiting the tournament in the most dramatic fashion and denied Africa its first World Cup semifinalists.
It’s a moment that still stings so much that Ghana FA president Kurt Okraku said when the draw was made for Qatar: “It will be revenge time.”
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For some Ghana fans, even knocking out Uruguay on Friday will not be enough to erase the memory of Johannesburg.
Suarez’s actions ended Ghana’s involvement at the World Cup but also prevented a moment of history for African football, which has still had only three teams (Cameroon in 1990, Senegal in 2002 and Ghana themselves in 2010) reach a quarterfinal, let alone go any further.
But it wasn’t just Suarez’s blatant save on the goal-line which angered an entire continent.
Suarez watched the resulting penalty from the mouth of the tunnel after Portuguese referee Olegario Benquerenca had shown a red card.
Asamoah Gyan smacked the ball off the crossbar and cameras caught Suarez celebrating wildly.
The game, which finished 1-1, was eventually decided by a penalty shootout, won 4-2 by Uruguay. Unrepentant afterwards, Suarez branded his intervention “the hand of god” — a nod to Diego Maradona’s handball goal for Argentina against England in 1986.
“Suarez cheated us,” former Ghana defender John Paintsil, who played that night, told ESPN.
“I’ll always remember what he did, which is not part of the rules of football. We were cheated by him. Using both hands on the line and doing it deliberately to stop us going to the semifinal, I would say Suarez wasn’t a professional. He cheated.”
