Ghanaian winger Christian Atsu has dismissed claims that the Black Stars threatened to forfeit their final group game at the World Cup.<\/p>\n
Ghana face Portugal on Thursday in a game\u00a0 they must win to stand any chance of qualifying to the next round of the tournament.<\/p>\n
However, reports emerged during the week of the player’s displeasure at the fact that their appearance fees had not been given to them.<\/p>\n
The Government has since had to airlift an amount believed to be in the region of $3 million to Brazil to pre-finance the appearance fees which FIFA pays only after the tournament, after reports alleging that the players were threatening not to play the game on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Atsu has, however, insisted that the Black Stars were always going to play the game, with or without the money.<\/p>\n
We are not going to say we are not going to play because of the money,” he said<\/p>\n
”We love our nation and we are going to play for our nation.”<\/p>\n
The Black Stars face Portugal on Thursday needing a win while hoping the other game between Germany and USA does not end in a draw.<\/p>\n
Kick-off for both games is 4:00 pm GMT.<\/p>\n
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By: Edwin Kwakofi\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana<\/p>\n
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Ghanaian winger Christian Atsu has dismissed claims that the Black Stars threatened to forfeit their final group game at the World Cup. Ghana face Portugal on Thursday in a game\u00a0 they must win to stand any chance of qualifying to the next round of the tournament. However, reports emerged during the week of the player’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":27520,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[115,29,3],"class_list":["post-27517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-armyworms","tag-dr-mahamudu-bawumia","tag-ghana-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}