It has to go down as the worst kept secret in Ghana football. Claude Le Roy was always favourite to become Ghana coach after Ratomir Dujkovic left in the wake of the fine world cup showing.
And after weeks of an intensive search, the FA has finally settled on the Frenchman labelled an elder statesman of European coaches in Africa for a two year term with a mandate to deliver a good showing at the 2008 African Cup of Nations.
Buoyed by the world cup showing and with football at least at the national team level in a much healthier state now than it has ever been, Le Roy will assume duty on October 1st with a simple mandate; to keep the flame and passion burning and more critically to take this long under-achieving yet hugely talented football nation to the next level.
We have an interesting two years ahead of us. Without nations cup qualification matches to play, Le Roy will have to prepare a winsome team from friendly games and hope they can still find the competitive edge to keep them in good stead when the tournament finally comes.
And he will have to find the right words for a group of players who could mistakenly think they have sealed their football legacies after the showing in Germany.
Feted as heroes after the world cup showing, bestowed with the nation’s highest honour and roundly applauded by a proud nation that had thirsted for world cup action for so long, Le Roy’s job will be to let those players know they have achievd nothing really yet.
In his background and career so far too, there is a lot in it to suggest he knows exactly how to handle and deal with the challenges the Ghana job throws up.
He was a nation’s cup runner-up and winner with Cameroon in 1986 and 1988. He was in charge of Senegal for four years in a reign that ended with a last eight finish in 1992 after defeat to Nigeria.
With Congo DR he masterminded a fine blend of experienced and well known players like Lua Lua, Shabani Nomda and home based talents like and got rewarded with a lst eight finish in Egypt at the 2006 Nations Cup.
When you look at his career as a coach, it is easy to see why the GFA went out on a limb for his services. He has been on the continent for twenty years, knows Africa inside out, stands out for the players he works with, is never afraid to pull them back in line when they go out of line and has showed often that he can get results.
He took charge of Cameroon at a crucial period. The Indomitable Lions were setting themselves up as an African powerhouse then.
Like Ghana they had come off a fresh and good world cup showing in 1982, the country was on the up, they had won their first African Nations Cup title in 1984 and needed someone to sustain it. They settled on LeRoy and it worked for them.
You could describe Le Roy as football man through and through. He was a journeyman player with a string of mediocre French clubs before venturing into management at Amiens, continued unremarkably in Grenoble and then started to take a turn that has seen travel the world over the last twenty years working in Africa, Asia and Europe.
In 1985 when he became the latest obscure European coach to be given the chance to make a name for himself in Africa with his appointment as appointed manager of Cameroon few could have predicted he will still be here.
But Le Roy knew how to make the most of the opportunity with a Cameroon side huge talent but short on organisation.
"I think you can either be what I call a 'Club Med manager' whereby you fly in three days before the match and leave again the day after," he says, "or you can really invest yourself in the country, live with the people you're supposed to be working with it, get a feel for what they're about and try to genuinely build something."
In Cameroon he chose the latter approach and quickly won admiration both for building teams around local-based players and for having the wherewithal to stand up to notoriously interfering politicians and officials. Soon, Leroy was proclaimed king.
In 1986, he took the Indomitable Lions to the African Nations Cup final, losing on penalties to hosts Egypt, and two years later he brought them one step further: Cameroon were crowned African champions.
Then came a four-year spell in charge of Senegal, where he ultimately failed to achieve the objective of winning the 1992 African Nations Cup on home turf. Since then he has managed Al-Shabah in the United Arab Emirates, the Malaysian national team, Cameroon again, Strasbourg in the French Ligue 1 and Shanghai Cosco in the Chinese second division.
He's been a Fifa instructor and a Milan "observer", and was also director of football at Paris Saint-German and, for a brief spell last season, at Cambridge United.
And so in May 2004, he was invited by president Joseph Kabila to take charge of DR Congo, who had been pitted into a World Cup qualifying group featuring regional powerhouses South Africa and Ghana.
He has since become something of a pest to many in the country's administration, hassling them for training bibs, cones and, on the eve of his first competitive match in charge - away to Uganda - confirmation of the team's flight details.
So clearly the Ghana has gone for a man who will test the GFA to the very core. Ghana Football Association spokesman Randy Abbey says Le Roy’s problems with Congo DR is unlikely to surface here because the Ghana Football Association will make working conditions appropriate for the man.
His first assignment will come in Asia where Ghana has lined up two games against Japan and South Korea. In a country where football rules the roost, we will be watching with keen interest how this whole exercise pans out.
The Frenchman, famous in his country for his work as a television pundit in the late 90s will know many of Ghana’s players.
And he will know there is a lot of quality in the side that could translate his grand ideas about the way football should be played.
He has built squads with a flair for playing attacking football but one that has been pragmatic enough to withdraw when need be. He describes “football as a permanent orgasm”. With a sharp wits too, the Frenchman knows how to deliver quotable quotes ala Jose Maurinho.
"Claude Leroy is brilliantly aware of the fact that communication and information are not at all the same thing," wrote French magazine L'Humanité before the 1998 World Cup, when Leroy was on his second stint in charge of Cameroon. "He knows that eloquence is the ideal g-string for people who want to hide embarrassing things about themselves."
The Guardian newspaper in the UK says while that may sound sinister, it actually means that Leroy is a charismatic character who's never shy to share his views on all kinds of topics ("I'm left-wing and that puts me at odds with 95% of people in the French footballing establishment") and who, with an almost infectious blend of charm and bluster, milks credit for his many successes but tends to gloss over failures.
Neither does he shy away from confrontation too. His well publicised run in with Lumano Lua Lua should be the perfect reminder to Ghanaian players that he will brood no primma donna attitudes.
"Just because players are dripping in gold doesn't mean you have to be lax with them," he told the Guardian. If he could back words with action and produce the results that Ghana badly needs at CAN 2008 he will justify the hype and money that has gone into his appointment.
Claude Le Roy (born in Bois-Normand-près-Lyre, February 6, 1948)
He was the coach of Cameroon national football team when they won the 1988 African Cup of Nations and finished as runners-up in the 1986 African Cup of Nations, and also their manager during the 1998 World Cup. He was the coach of Senegal national football team when they reached the quarterfinals at the 1992 African Cup of Nations. He has also coached Strassburg in France, Cambridge United in UK, the United Arab Emirates, China and Malaysia.
