WHEN GHANA run out to face Nigeria in the African Cup of Nations quarter-final this afternoon, the most obvious absentee will be their captain, Stephen Appiah. He has missed the whole tournament with a knee injury, but at least he is there, offering moral support. There is another great Ghanaian playmaker, though, still only 33, and a former player of the tournament at a World Under-17 championship, who is not merely absent, but is not even thought of. Nii Lamptey was once nominated by Pele as his successor, but it is 12 years since he last played for his country, and although he is in Accra, he is there only as the director of the school he has established.

Lamptey's is a life shocking in its tragedy. That a player so outrageously gifted as he was should have played fewer than 200 games in an itinerant career that took him to 10 countries across four continents would be bad enough, yet that is the least of his agonies. He has lost two children in the first four months of their lives. He was misled over signing-on fees and quite possibly fleeced by a series of agents. His alcoholic father, who used to beat him, died shortly after he had reconciled with him, and his mother died last year. "I buried them both alone," he said. "I've been through hell."

The blame for most of his misfortune, Lamptey has no doubt, lies with witchcraft and the juju men who stalk football in west Africa. Things began to go wrong with his first international for Ghana, away to Togo in 1991. "It was there. I can't hide it," he said. "I was vomiting blood on the pitch. So it is there when people want your downfall. I know if it was me alone and people had left me to be the way God created me and wanted me to be, for sure I should have been playing for Madrid now."

Just who those people are requires some explanation. His life, in truth, was miserable long before that first international. He spent his early life in Accra terrified of the beatings he received from his parents. "Some nights I would sleep under a car or a kiosk, and the next day start my life again," he said.

After his parents divorced when he was eight, Lamptey followed his father to Kumasi, where life got even harder. "My father did not want to take care of me because of his new wife," he said. "My father used to beat me with his belt, but I got used to it and did not cry any more. So he would smoke a cigarette and burn me with it."

Eventually he left, and went to live with the Kaloum Stars football team. The only problem was that they were a Muslim side and so he had to convert. His father, who was by then well on his way to becoming an alcoholic, didn't like it, and would regularly go to the mosque while Lamptey was praying and try to drag him away. Only 10 years later, as Lamptey finally found an understanding with his father, did he return to Christianity.

In 1989, Lamptey came to Scotland with Ghana for the World Under-16 Championship. It was there that Pele picked him out and, afterwards, Rangers, Vasco da Gama and Anderlecht all showed interest in signing him. The Ghanaian FA, though, were determined to keep the squad together so, when they returned to Accra, they confiscated their passports. When the agent of Steve Keshi, Anderlecht's Nigerian centre-back, arrived to make further enquiries, they tried to have him arrested. Crucially, though, he got his card, bearing a Lagos address, to Lamptey.

As soon as Lamptey was released from the training camp, he went to the bus station and found a driver willing to smuggle him across Benin and Togo to Nigeria. At the borders, Lamptey pretended to be asleep or hid behind the driver's seat. Once in Lagos, he was given a passport in the name of Keshi's son, and flown to Brussels, where he signed a five-year contract with Anderlecht.

Lamptey was happiest, he says, during his one season on loan at PSV Eindhoven in 1994, when he was effectively Romario's replacement. As far as he is concerned, his real problems began after his marriage to Gloria. Tribally, he is Ga, she is Fante, and his fellow Muslims in Kumasi were opposed to the match.

"They wanted me to marry one of their relatives," Lamptey explained. "I met my wife, brought her to Kumasi, she met them. They were saying I shouldn't marry her, that she would chop my money. Later they asked why I was in a rush and said I could marry the president's daughter if I wanted. Those people were telling others: We'll see if he plays for the national team again'. And it has come to pass. Since 1996 I have not played for Ghana. And I think that maybe, maybe if I hadn't gone there or maybe if it wasn't my destiny, that maybe I would be the captain of this team now."

The subject is clearly painful, and his eyes welled with tears as went on. "Sometimes I will be in my room and I will cry. You can see that there is something you can still do, but that thing has been taken away from you. It's really, really painful and Well, what should you do? I remember there is all this juju in football."

It was as though he was doomed never to settle. After PSV, Lamptey went on to Aston Villa and Coventry - a mistake, he acknowledges, because the style of football did not suit him - then Venezia in Italy and Union de Santa Fe in Argentina. It was there that his four-month-old son Diego died from a breathing disorder and, after breaking his contract to be with him in hospital in Buenos Aires, he returned to Europe with the Turkish side Ankaragucu. Then it was on to Portugal, Germany - where his daughter Lisa died from the same condition that had killed Diego - China and Dubai before he finally returned to Ghana to win a league title with Asante Kotoko. That was in 2006 and Lamptey has not played professionally since. He has dallied with the Ivorian side ASEC and with Jomo Cosmos in South Africa, but in both cases he has ultimately preferred to stay with the school he established three years ago.

"If I'm doing anything, I make sure I'm among the best," he said. "No matter how small the thing is, I make sure I do it to look very very nice. This school makes me happy."

Two of his daughters study there and there is now a third, Malaika, who will be two in May. "I did not want to have another child because of what I went through with the other two," he said, "but you know women: if they love you they have to give you children."

He also runs a farm just outside Accra that, after just a year of operation, boasts 104 cattle. Slowly, it seems, his life is coming back together. The regrets, though, will never leave him.