Sulley Muntari put the ball on the spot very deliberately. The Manchester United support behind the goal at Old Trafford bayed. He remembers looking up at them for a moment, a couple of seconds that have stayed with him, before pushing his head back down and considering the reality. Focus. The FA Cup quarter-final was level at 0-0, 12 minutes remained and Muntari stood over the penalty kick that would take Portsmouth to Wembley for the semi-final. Pompey have a curious FA Cup claim to fame. They were once the holders for a record seven years. That followed their last appearance in the final. The year was 1939. Shots at glory have skipped generations. The whistles from the red hordes intensified. Muntari seemed to be taking an age. Thirty seconds had ticked by from his placing of the ball. Then there was the swing of his left boot, the bottom corner swelled and the midfielder sauntered away in celebration. A pressure situation? Muntari shrugs. He knows the true meaning of the term. Back in Konongo, the Ghanaian town in which he grew up, the stakes in street football could hardly have been higher. Muntari is Muslim yet he did not much care for the Arabic school his mother sent him to and he would bunk off to play game after game with his friends. From dawn until dusk they hustled. Victory sated their hunger on more than one level. "We'd challenge other teams to make money in order to eat," said Muntari. "On a Saturday, when I had Arabic school, I wouldn't go and instead I'd go out with my Christian friends. Every street we reached, we'd play a game. We had a little bit of money so we'd put it on the game. If we won, we took all of it. "If you leave home in the morning, your mum will definitely be angry with you so you can't go back home to get food. You have to play football to earn money to eat. We'd play barefoot, from gutter to gutter and it might have been on streets where cars would pass so it was dangerous. "If we lost, we didn't eat but we had good players. Our neighbourhood is known to be a little bit notorious so other teams got afraid of us and that gave us an advantage to win. We were very strong and we wanted to win everything." Muntari has long possessed an astonishing single-mindedness. He not only knew that he wanted to play the game professionally but that it had to be in a European league. Peer pressure could not touch him; youthful distractions were blotted out. "Where I used to go to train, where I used to play, at a second division club called Oweriman, they smoked weed," he said. "A lot of my friends were very good footballers but they ended up smoking that. I was 14, 15 and I was telling them 'Don't be smoking.' Maybe they didn't want to go far and just wanted to have fun and stay there. In Africa, it's hard. When you give birth to a little boy, from seven or eight, he starts to take care of himself. By the time I was 15, I had already matured and I knew what I wanted. I didn't want to go down that path, to smoke." Muntari established himself in the Oweriman team before his 16th birthday and he enjoyed a call-up to the Ghana Under-17s. It was not long before the biggest club in the land came calling and they knew how to get their business done. Although Muntari's family was not poor by local standards - his mother provided for him, his two younger brothers and sister by trading cloth, as their father worked away as a football coach in Nigeria - she could not afford to turn down the cash gifts from Asante Kotoko. She was to deliver Muntari to them but, seeing a bigger picture, he had other ideas. "I knew about Kotoko, players got lost there and they didn't move on abroad," he said. "They were giving my mum money behind my back, which was good for her and therefore the family. But I didn't want quick money. "I looked at Liberty Professionals, my close friend Michael Essien's old club, the third or fourth biggest in Ghana. He played there for a couple of months and then got his move to Europe and Derek Boateng was the same. That's all I wanted. My mum was very angry with me. I said to her 'You can be angry with me today but tomorrow, you will appreciate what will come'." Muntari signed for Liberty at the age of 16. After a couple of months in their team, and an inspiring week-long trial at Manchester United in April 2001, he moved to Udinese in Serie A. He began to live the dream. His seamless adaptation to life in the Premier League with Portsmouth, whom he joined for a then club-record £7m last summer, has surprised no one who followed him in Italy. Or at the World Cup in 2006, when Ghana made their debut on the grandest stage. His Udinese debut was at San Siro against Milan. "Maldini, Rivaldo, Costacurta, Dida, they all played," smiled Muntari, but he was the man of the match. He experienced the Champions League. Udinese played in the 2005-06 group phase, the stand-out tie coming at Camp Nou against Barcelona, when Ronaldinho ran riot and scored a hat-trick in a 4-1 win. Muntari is determined to return to Europe's elite competition. "It's such a huge tournament, I call it the semi-World Cup," he said. At the full version in Germany, Muntari excelled. Harry Redknapp was among the many managers who watched the then 21-year-old propel Ghana to victory over the Czech Republic in the second group game, which set them fair for qualification to the knockout stage, where they were beaten by Brazil. There was also a jaw-dropping moment for Muntari after the Czech game, when he first laid eyes on Menaye Donkor, the Ghanaian beauty queen and model who, after a deal of legwork from him, would become his girlfriend. Donkor runs a charity for children suffering from Aids-related illnesses and an international school in Ghana that offers education to many more from disadvantaged backgrounds. Donkor has smoothed some of Muntari's rough edges and he has become a leading contributor to her charities. "I love children a lot and Menaye is the same," said Muntari. "I'm very aware of the problem of Aids in Africa and we do our best for the kids." Muntari admits that a few years ago, people who did not know him "would say I have the reputation of bad boy". He had been expelled from the 2004 Olympic squad after an argument with the management and when his apologies fell on deaf ears, he got angry, asking the Udinese president to put his international retirement in writing. "I am not a bad boy," said Muntari who was in the wilderness for 18 months, but would now "love to play for my country until I cannot play any more". "I just don't want someone to take advantage of me," he added. "If you speak your mind, people will say 'He thinks he has made it' but that's not the case. I don't want you to step on me so before you do that, I am going to step on you." Focus. It is almost a byword for Muntari and, having come so far, getting past West Bromwich Albion in the semi-final, he will accept nothing other than victory today against Cardiff. The disappointment of falling short at the semi-final stage of the African Cup of Nations in Ghana earlier this year remains fresh. He refuses to allow what would be the first winners' medal of his career to slip through his fingers. "It's always been my dream to play in England, and to reach the FA Cup final in my first season is amazing," he said. "We might be the favourites but when you have the pressure on you, that shows you are doing well. These are the times that people need you, these are the times that everyone is looking at your club. You don't have to be afraid." Muntari never has been. Source: The Guardian