For Abdul Karim Zito, impossible is nothing
There are only few boxes Abdul Karim Zito hasn’t checked yet in his long career as a football coach, but it’s only in recent years that the sexagenarian’s brilliance is truly coming to the fore.
In March 2021, the veteran Ghanaian trainer brought an U-20 Africa Cup of Nations run at the helm of the Black Satellites to a triumphant climax, winning the country’s first major trophy at any level of international football since Sellas Tetteh carried the same team to FIFA World Cup glory in 2009.
That success cemented Zito’s legacy as a nurturer of young talent, a reputation that he has spent years building and burnishing. He has coached all of Ghana’s age-grade teams — from the U23s down even to the U-15s, whom he currently handles — and you’d struggle to find a more astute youth football specialist in the land.
Zito, however, is much more than that.
His resume also reveals a more-than-decent track record in club football. And while he doesn’t have an awful lot of silverware to his name, there is still plenty he can point to as proof of his expertise at that level.
Over the years, Zito has guided as many as four teams to Premier League promotion, also enjoying stints with Ghana’s biggest teams, Asante Kotoko and Accra Hearts of Oak — you don’t get to be at either of those clubs, never mind both, if you don’t know your onions.
The outfit he’s been with for nearly a whole decade now, though, is one of a smaller profile, Dreams FC.
Dreams are the latest of the teams that owe their top-flight status to Zito, a task he completed in 2018, three years after first joining their multi-layered set-up as youth development coach.
He has since served the club in various technical roles, helping shape its identity, bring young players through, and consolidate its place as a Premier League constant.
And he has certainly been more hands-on since last season, when Dreams won their — and his — first major trophy, the FA Cup, by virtue of which they also secured a maiden ticket for inter-club football.
There wasn’t much excitement among the general Ghanaian football fanbase as Dreams prepared to begin that adventure, in the CAF Confederation Cup. Ghanaian teams haven’t had much success on the continental front in a very long while, with even more pedigreed campaigners like Kotoko and Hearts failing to make any impact.
On their debut, then, not many expected Dreams’ participation to amount to much. Yet against all odds, they’ve managed to excel, first progressing from the qualifying rounds to the lucrative ‘money zone’ and now emerging top of a group that has seen former African champions Club Africain eliminated.
They may have begun with a defeat to the Tunisians and finished with another to runners-up Rivers United, but, between those negative results, Dreams were impeccable, not dropping a single point at home or on the road.
It ensures they avoid North African giants USM Alger, Zamalek and RS Berkane —winners of four of the last five editions — in the quarter-final, with their only truly formidable prospective opponents in the next round being fellow West Africans Stade Malien, but even they aren’t so daunting.
It’s hard imagining Dreams getting this far —farther than any Ghanaian club has gone in any African competition, in fact, since Hearts and Kotoko contested the 2004 Confederation Cup final — under a head coach less experienced or savvy than Zito.
Shrewd recruitment and good organisation may have powered Dreams’ march, but, in Zito, they have a tactician and man-manager to make this team add up to more than just the sum of its parts — which is what has now been achieved, to his immense credit.
Almost three years to the day Zito masterminded a feat no other coach has accomplished with a Ghanaian national team in 15 years, he’s now broken another jinx, this time in club football, one that’s lasted all of two decades.
Zito, for reasons already implied in this piece, has always been one of the more underrated coaches on the domestic scene, and yet he clearly has a knack for pulling off what even some of his more celebrated peers seem incapable of.
Dreams may advance even further than they already have in the Confederation Cup, potentially filling Zito’s cap with a couple more feathers, but regardless of what happens from here, the man has earned his flowers.
Give them to him already.
