Caleb Yirenkyi's Late Winner Secures Ghana's Victory Against Panama

Caleb Yirenkyi had been rehearsing that run for weeks. The timing, the angle, the finish. On June 17, deep into stoppage time with Ghana locked at 0-0 against Panama and the tension suffocating, the teenager finally stepped into the moment he and his coaches had drawn up on training pitches far from the World Cup glare.

Ghana 1, Panama 0.

For long stretches, this was not the comfortable evening many had forecast for the Black Stars. Panama pressed, probed and pushed Ghana back, forcing Carlos Queiroz’s young side to suffer and survive. The favourites looked flat. Passes went astray, the tempo dipped, and what was supposed to be a routine group win drifted steadily towards stalemate.

Then came the break that changed everything.

Ghana won the ball back in added time and, instead of taking the safe option, played on instinct and instruction. Antoine Semenyo drove forward, Brandon Thomas-Asante joined the surge, and suddenly Panama’s back line – so composed for most of the night – was scrambling. Arriving late from midfield, exactly as scripted, was Yirenkyi.

He did not snatch at it. He did not hesitate. He simply arrived in the box and finished, the culmination of a pattern he later revealed had been drilled relentlessly since the squad first gathered.

"That's what we have been practicing since we started our preparation," he explained afterwards, outlining a plan built on stretching opponents wide and flooding the penalty area with runners. Win it, work it to the flanks, deliver, arrive. Simple on paper, devastating when executed with conviction in the 90-something minute of a World Cup match.

When that turnover came, Yirenkyi’s instincts followed the blueprint.

He looked forward, played forward, and kept running. Hope did the rest. The ball found him in the area, and he applied the decisive touch that turned a frustrating night into a precious World Cup victory.

For the teenager, it was not just a match-winner. It was another milestone in a whirlwind rise.

The FC Nordsjælland midfielder only made his senior Ghana debut last year, in a 2-1 defeat to Nigeria at the Unity Cup. Since then, his trajectory has been steep. A breakthrough season in Denmark – 30 league appearances, two goals, six assists – pushed him quickly into the conversation as one of Queiroz’s most trusted midfield options. His goal against Panama was his second in as many games for Ghana, following his strike against Wales in a pre-World Cup friendly earlier this month.

This is not a veteran-laden Ghana side of old. It is a team in transition, with experienced internationals edging towards the end and a hungry new core trying to seize the shirt and the future at the same time. In that environment, young players often sink or shrink. Yirenkyi talks instead about guidance.

"We have great support around us," he said, highlighting how the older players feed information and standards into the next generation. The message is clear: listen, learn, run for each other, and trust the work.

That work, by all accounts, has been brutal.

Yirenkyi pointed to Queiroz’s training sessions as the foundation for Ghana’s resilience under pressure. High intensity. Constant lessons. A daily demand to repeat movements and decisions until they become instinct. The late winner against Panama, in his eyes, was not a stroke of fortune but the logical outcome of that grind.

"That thing is the lessons," he said. "We do a lot of training and with a lot of intensity." The goal, in other words, started long before kickoff.

Ghana needed every ounce of that preparation. Expected to coast, they instead laboured. Panama forced errors and unsettled the rhythm, and the Black Stars had to claw their way out of problems they partly created themselves. Lesser teams would have settled for the point. This one, still raw but ambitious, kept looking for a way to turn one into three.

Inside the camp, Yirenkyi insists, the mindset is collective and relentlessly forward-facing. He talks about doing what they can do best "each and every day," about learning from teammates, coaches, and staff, and about taking the journey "day by day." The language is simple, but the intent is sharp: no passengers, no passengers allowed.

"It's everyone, helping each other out," he said. Not just about his own surge in form, not just about his name on the scoresheet. The goal, as he frames it, belongs to the group.

The belief, too, is shared. He describes a squad that is "very positive," united by a single ambition: to give their best in this tournament and see where that standard takes them. On nights like this, when a young midfielder sprints into the box in stoppage time and buries the chance he has been visualising all month, that belief feels less like a slogan and more like a threat to whoever stands in Ghana’s way next.