2023-06-21 08:40:12
“I dream of seeing these kids become professional footballers and develop in the championships of England, Spain and Russia,” the 37-year-old former defender, who arrived in this small ex-Soviet republic in Central Asia 16 years ago, told AFP.
“Before, there was no football club in Leninsky,” recalls Tago, who speaks fluent Russian. “When I married my Kyrgyz wife, they asked if I might teach the children to play football.”
Tago is part of a group of active or retired players from Ghana who were initially in Kyrgyzstan due to a combination of circumstances, and now seek to develop football in this mountainous country where the athletes shine in wrestling or mixed martial arts.
After a career that ended with several titles, including the award for the best player in Kyrgyzstan in 2009, this articulate man with a wide smile founded his children’s club under the name “Tago-Leninsky Football School”.
“I signed up right away as soon as Daniel Tagoe opened this club,” says eight-year-old Daniel Muhammed Aliyev, who was wearing the team’s blue and yellow jersey.
“To come to the training, I cross the fields, because I come from a far village,” he adds.
“professional level”
So far, regarding 80 boys between the ages of 6 and 18 have obtained their licenses and are playing on a new artificial turf court, a few steps away from the primary school named in honor of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union that collapsed in the early 1990s, but whose map is still painted red on it. one of the walls.
On the field that served as a field office before Tagoe’s arrival, horses graze, mares nurse their foals, goal lists without a net.
For Zamir Gochev, who registered his daughter and son, “everything is organized on a professional level.”
He says that “it is rare that there is a former player in the Kyrgyz national team as a coach.”
The Kyrgyz national team slipped from the bottom of the FIFA rankings to 75th place before settling into the top 100.
And this team has already qualified twice for the Asian Cup, with the help of Tagoe and David Tite, and they are the two most brilliant players of this small Ghanaian immigrant group following they defended the colors of the “White Falcons”.
The common point between them is that they both played for Dordoi Bishkek, the capital club that dominates the Kyrgyz league, winning 13 titles since independence in 1991.
And if Tago, like his compatriots, has become a star in Kyrgyzstan today, he has also faced racism. “I was insulted, they laughed at me,” he lamented.
Local legend
Tagu first appeared in Russia, where Dorduy-Bishkek spotted him and persuaded him to come. His resounding success encouraged many of his compatriots to try their luck in Kyrgyzstan, 11,000 kilometers from their country of origin.
“We paved the way, that’s why other Ghanaians come,” he says.
As for local legend David Tete, who scored 123 goals for Dordoy, he considers that today “everyone wants to come and play in Dordoy, especially the Ghanaians.”
The last of these was striker Joel Kojo, who participated in mid-June with Kyrgyzstan in the Central Asian Cup.
“David Tite and Daniel Tagoe were among the first foreign players to come to Kyrgyzstan. For me, they are the two best African players who played here,” Dordoy director Ruslan Sidikov told AFP.
Therefore, you see the shirts of these two players framed on the wall of the corridor leading to the manager’s office, and they are also among the 11 iconic players in Dordoi’s history.
“We thought it was worth signing other African players,” adds Sidikov, who was once captain of the Kyrgyz national team.
Tite, who is now an assistant coach at Dordui, remembers a time when “everyone knew that if we, the African players, were there, Dordui would win”.
“I love Dordui, that’s everything for me. I want to find a Ghanaian player who can break my record for goals,” he added.
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