Coach of the national U-20 team, the Black Satellites, Karim Zito has revealed that his team prepared very well for penalties ahead of the WAFU Zone B championship after progressing to the finals of the competition with victory over Niger.
The Black Satellites reached the finals after defeating Niger 5-3 on penalties, and picked one of the tickets for the Africa Youth Championships next year in Mauritania.
Ghana has struggled at competitions when games are to be settled from the spot, most recently at the Nations Cup in Egypt.
But Karim Zito did not leave any stone unturned as his boys practiced after every training session the technique of penalty taking.
“Penalties are often Ghana’s bane. So as part of my training, penalties are practiced at the end of every session,” Zito told Silver FM.
“We tried this severally before leaving Ghana for the tournament.
“The goalkeeper we introduced for Danlad is good at taking penalties and also his frame makes him a good option to scare opponents in shootout scenarios.
“So we always leave one change available for such an instance. It is something we practice at training and you can see that for once we were able to score all the kicks.
“We were repeating this all the time so we were certain of those who would take the kicks,” he concluded.