Nigeria sleepwalks towards missing South Africa 2010 

By Ayo Akinfe 

With the 2010 World Cup qualifiers due to start in May, Nigeria is once more looking like a country not interested in participating in the Mundial. I challenge anyone to give me one good reason why Nigeria deserves to go to the big dance.

At the moment, we have no coach, are not playing friendlies, do not know our best team, lack cohesion and have no plans to integrate young players into the squad. While we are in this our habitual deep slumber, everyone else is aggressively stepping up preparations and correcting their flaws.

Looking at the current dire situation, it would take a miracle of biblical proportions for all our current problems to be resolved before our first qualifier against South Africa on May 30. In Nigeria, we are used to this kind of lack of planning but what I find surprising is that after the furore over the failure of the Galadima board, everyone is taking the current nonsense so calmly.

After the recent debacle of Ghana 08 and missing out on Germany 06, one would have thought that Nigeria has learnt her lessons but alas, we have not. As things stand, we are probably the most ill-prepared nation in the world for the 2010 World Cup and I find it inexplicable that nobody seems to care.

We failed to qualify for Germany 06 because the Nigerian Football Association (NFA) left an unqualified, ill-equipped and technically limited coach in the form of Christian Chukwu in charge of the team. Moves to replace him only began after our failure to beat Angola in Kano, by which time it was too late.

I must confess that one of the things that makes Nigeria such a lovely and wonderful country is our love for the dramatic. We as a people love sailing close to the wind, skating on thin ice and staring death in the face now and again.

Unfortunately, our knack of pulling back from the precipice to prevent us falling into the abyss does not always work and on many occasions, we have been known to lose our footing and take the plunge. This is exactly what happened in 2006 and all the signs point to it happening again in 2010.

South Africa 2010 will probably represent Nigeria’s best chance of winning the World Cup in our lifetime. Home advantage has always been a key advantage in the World Cup and in South Africa, there is no doubt that the home fans will be rooting for the continent’s own teams.

By the time the World Cup comes round to Africa again, most of us will either be dead or too old to appreciate what is going on. Africa’s most populous nation should be using this chance-in-a-lifetime to catapult the continent to the top of the rostrum and seek to claim a place at the high table of the elite but alas, once more, the giant is letting the continent down.

When first elected, I believed that the Sani Lulu-led board should have been given a mandate to win South Africa 2010 or get kicked out but now, that actually seems far-fetched, as we may not even be there. To win the Mundial, you have to qualify first.

We are two years away from the World Cup and in every sane nation on earth, planning has begun. Our Eagles have no coach and looking at the way the bungling NFA is having endless meetings with no solution in sight, I doubt if we will have one by May 30.

For starters, I am not aware of the NFA interviewing or talking to any world class coach capable of motivating the boys, making our opponents fear us and technically astute enough to navigate the early stages of the World Cup. At the moment, they are talking to a group of local coaches but deep down, I believe that the members of the Sani Lulu board knows that this is a recipe for disaster.

To coach Nigeria’s Super Eagles effectively, you need to be a coach who stands head and shoulders above the players. Given the kind of king-sized egos we Nigerians come with, our coach needs to be a man who the players will respect, fear and revere.

If he is a coach who they believe that they have played at a higher level than, we have all the components for a disaster. Our boys as we know them, will never play with guts, passion, motivation and unbridled loyalty for a coach like Samson Siasia, Amodu Shaibu or Stephen Keshi.

We need a man of the calibre of say Gus Hiddink, Giovanni Trapattoni, Luis Van Gaal, Klaus Toepmoller, Jean Tigana or Frank Rijkaard. Anything less than that and we will get the kind of lacklustre, indifferent performances we saw in Ghana 08.

Talking of Ghana 08, I hope that the NFA has managed to extricate itself from the messy tangle it got into with the clueless and pathologically lazy Berti Vogts. Now that the man has been appointed as Azerbaijan’s head coach, any further payments from the NFA should cease.

No heads rolled over the Berti saga despite the fact that the NFA was warned about the man’s limitations, his laziness, his refusal to scout our players and the fact that he was screaming about knowing 20 of his 23-man squad before he had even met half of the players. The NFA board may have got away with it once but should they make a hash of things in 2010, they should be subject to worse treatment than any erring sports board has ever faced in the history of Nigeria.

If the reports we read about Globacom offering to pay the salaries of a new coach are true, why has someone not been appointed? Why are we not playing friendlies, making use of Fifa windows, scouting young players and integrating our youngsters into the main team?

During the March 25/26 Fifa window, 23 African teams played friendly games, in certain cases against opposition as formidable as Argentina and France. We do not even have any idea when we will have a helmsman and yet, for some reason, we think we have a right to pick up a World Cup ticket ahead of some of these our more serious and better-prepared continental brothers.

Given how woeful we were in Ghana 08, I am still scratching my head as to how even a man like Gus Hiddink would turn things round within two years. We need a good clearout and the introduction of a whole host of new blood into the team.

Many of our players are way past their prime and were it not for the fact that they are using their “football ages” rather than their real dates of birth, their clubs would have retired many of them too. Some of our best and most talented players were involved in the Late Yemi Tella’s victorious U-17 team and you do not need to be a rocket scientist to realise that we need some of these boys in the team.

As we speak, players like Chrisantus MaCauley, Lukman Haruna and Rabiu Ibrahim would get into any Eagles 23 squad if selection is based solely on merit. How soon we appoint someone who will realise this and get on with this may well determine if we will be in South Africa or will be at home enjoying the Nigerian summer.