Ghana will meet Portugal in their World Cup 2022 Group H opener at Doha’s Stadium 974 on Thursday 24 November 2022.
Since their debut in Germany 2006, this will be Ghana’s fourth appearance at the FIFA World Cup.
There were questions over the African team heading into the competition, given their patchy squad under Otto Addo and competitive group they were drawn in.
Yet, an impressive 2-0 win over Switzerland in a recent pre-World Cup friendly has raised hopes amongst fans.
Embed from Getty ImagesSpeaking at the press conference ahead of their match against Portugal on Thursday, the Black Stars’ head coach, Otto Addo stated that his team’s focus is to survive the group stages of the 2022 World Cup.
“Surely we want to survive the group stage. We want to go game by game so our full focus is on the Portuguese game,” he said.
“It’s very difficult to predict so our main focus is to win against Portugal, which will be very difficult. After that, we’ll look at the next step.”
Addo also refused to predict how far the team will get in Qatar but insisted that anything is possible.
“From there, nobody knows, it depends on who you get and also how you play,” he said.
The only previous encounter between Ghana and Portugal was in the group stages of the 2014 World Cup.
With a winning goal from Cristiano Ronaldo, Ghana was defeated 1-2.
The African team will also play against Uruguay and South Korea in Group H, which is considered to be some challenging battles for them to make it through to the knockout stages.
Portugal XI: Costa; Cancelo, Dias, Pereira, Guerreiro; Neves, Otavio; Fernandes, Felix, Silva; Ronaldo.
Ghana XI: Zigi; Amartey, Seidu, Djiku, Salisu, Rahman; Abdul Samed, Partey, Kudus; Williams, A. Ayew.