Mohammed Kudus, West Ham’s incredibly talented winger, has been a standout performer for the club since he joined from Ajax last year. However, his experience with the Ghana national team has been mixed.
Kudus is understandably the big hope in his home country, but Ghana were dumped out of the African Nations back in January despite the endeavours of Kudus.
The Black Stars just got over the line with a scrappy 4-3 win over the Central African Republic in a World Cup qualifying match in the summer but Kudus’ performance was criticised by some of the country’s fans on social media.
Then it went from bad to worse when they lost 1-0 at home to Angola in their first qualifier for the next African Nations.
Kudus was played in a more central role as he does for the Irons, but once again he failed to find the back of the net.
Ghana Web gave Kudus a 6/10 for his performance and praised him for dropping deep to try and drag his team forward. But they also accused Kudus of holding on to the ball for too long ‘unnecessarily’.
There was a lot of chatter and criticism on social media accusing Kudus of not replicating his West Ham form for the national team. However, that would be an oversimplification of Kudus’s situation given that he has already been used more times on the left under Julen Lopetegui than in the whole of last season under David Moyes.
He has another game on Monday night when Ghana have an away game at Niger. Let`s hope he scores a confidence boosting goal or two and returns to the London Stadium injury free, for the weekend game against Fulham.