Antoine Semenyo is set to face England in Massachusetts on Tuesday after growing up in England while watching Ghana’s 2010 World Cup run with his family. He was 10 years old when Ghana came within a Luis Suárez handball of reaching the semi-finals. The same team memory now sits behind a match that pulls his past and present together.
“I remember being at my uncle’s house, and we were screaming after the handball, thinking we were going through,” Semenyo said in an interview last month. He also said the games brought the whole family together in one house in Bexleyheath, with his mother, father, uncles, aunties and cousins all gathering to watch. “Ghana came in [for me] when I was 19 or 20, so I was never going to turn it down.”
Bexleyheath and the 2010 memory
That childhood setting matters because the memory he described is tied to Ghana’s best-known tournament run. Ghana reached the quarter-finals of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, beat Serbia 1-0 in the opening match, and drew with Australia in the second game before the knockout stage pushed the team one step from history.
Jonathan Mensah said, “The momentum we got from the first game was really important,” and added, “To get a point in our second game was crucial because that helped us qualify for the next stage. Now we need another good game against a good English side.” Those results still form the standard Ghana keep measuring themselves against whenever the tournament comes back around.
England and the older benchmark
The sharp edge in this matchup is that Ghana’s 2010 run ended in Johannesburg, where Dominic Adiyiah’s goalbound header was blocked with both hands by Luis Suárez. Before that, Ghana had already won the Under-20 World Cup in Egypt by beating Brazil on penalties, so the 2010 team carried the feel of a side built to keep moving forward.
Since then, the record has been uneven. Ghana finished bottom of their group at the World Cup in Brazil and did not fare much better at the World Cup in Qatar, even with a win over South Korea, and they failed to reach the Africa Cup of Nations finals last year for the first time since 2004. The current side, coached by Carlos Queiroz, goes into England in Massachusetts with that history attached to every touch.
For Semenyo, the link is personal and immediate. He grew up in England, but the family gatherings in Bexleyheath gave Ghana’s World Cup games a different weight, and Tuesday’s match asks whether the team can make that old memory feel current again.
