Arsenal v Manchester United, Saturday November 3rd 2007 Football fever in football-mad Ghana will reach a crescendo in January, when the African Nations Cup kicks off in the capital, Accra. Ghanaians are passionate about their national football team – the Black Stars - but they also get mighty worked up about English football. Every Saturday afternoon in Accra (Ghana time being exactly the same as GMT), thousands of men, too poor to own satellite TV, pack into bars and halls to watch the English Premiership. Last Saturday my friend, Abdulai, invited me and two other Englishmen to join him in a nameless location in downtown Accra to watch Arsenal v Manchester United. For 7000 cedis (about 40p) we entered a large undecorated hall, where five hundred men, seated on plastic chairs, were grouped around four TV's.
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