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Nigerians ever passionate about their country’s
football are unlikely to grope for reasons for the Super Eagles ouster from the
African Cup of Nations in Ghana. The most readily available scape-goat is, of
course, Berti Vogts, the manager whose previous track record as handler of his
native Germany and subsequently, Scotland are sufficiently appalling to render
his latest failure unsurprising. He would be followed by the habitually
incompetent Nigerian Football Association (NFA) which hired him in the first
place. These are easy if customary sacrificial lambs for the wrath of angry
Nigerian fans. But the eagles’ ignominious exit from Africa’s biggest
competition is also rooted in more sublime truths.
Let’s face it: Nigeria is no longer the superpower
of African football that it used to be. The inexorable decline of Nigerian
football started shortly after the nation’s memorable maiden appearance at the
World Cup in USA ‘94. A remarkable generation of footballers led by stars like
Yekini, Amuneke, Finidi, Siasia, Chidi Nwanu, and Uche Okechukwu among others
had won the African Cup of Nations and had gone on to stamp the Nigerian
presence on the world scene that year. Only a narrow second round defeat by
Italy, the eventual losing finalists, halted Nigeria’s impressive debut. Two
years later at the Atlanta Olympics, a younger generation of footballers dubbed
the Dream Team featuring Kanu, Oruma, Babayaro and Taribo West won the soccer
gold medal beating superpowers like Brazil and Argentina along the way. The
seamless transition from one generation to the next that would have built on
these successes never happened. An unnecessary political row between Nigeria
and South Africa resulted in the Abacha junta stupidly withdrawing the Super
Eagles from the African Cup in 1996.
The Confederation of African Football punished Nigeria by banning it
from the 1998 edition. Nigerian football was thus blacked out on the continent
for six crucial years.
Subsequent world cup appearances illustrated the
decline of Nigerian football. In France ’98, the eagles crashed out in the
second round due among other things to rows over money and the players’
fixation on a dream quarter-final clash with Brazil rather than focussing on
their immediate second round opponents, Denmark who threw them out with a
humiliating 4-1 defeat. In Korea-Japan 2002, the eagles managed by the
colourless Festus Onigbinde crashed out of the first round without a single win
and having scored only one goal in three matches. This time, Onigbinde’s
prehistoric tactics and technical ineptitude were largely to blame. Four years
later, Nigeria failed to even qualify for the tournament, subverted by the
gross incompetence of the beer-guzzling, pepper-soup loving manager, “clueless”
Christian Chukwu and the serial bungling of the NFA.
Ghana’s decisive defenestration of the eagles in
the quarter-finals of the African cup marks a new low for Nigerian football.
Given the quality of the eagles’ play and the high standard of the championship,
a quarter-final exit was probably more than the Nigeria deserved. After all,
our uninspiring performances in the first round had required Cote’d’Ivoire’s
ruthless demolition of Mali to keep us in the tournament. Against Ghana
however, there was no get out of jail card. Despite a first half penalty lead
and the second half expulsion of the Black Stars captain, John Mensah, the
eagles couldn’t subdue ten men and eventually conceded a soft goal in the last
ten minutes of the match. Astute observers of the tournament would have found
the result unsurprising. Nigeria came to the championship rated as genuine
contenders and buoyed by their deceptive (and inexplicable) rating by FIFA as
the leading African nation in world soccer. It took just two games for the
fallacy of that ranking to be exposed.
The eagles were in fact, an average side. The team
lacked spirit, character and leadership. Kanu who could have provided some of
these qualities on the pitch hobbled off during the first game. No one could
step into his boots. Mikel, Nigeria’s young midfield ace still has to grow into
that role. The team was an assortment of individuals that failed to function as
a unit. Vogts’s team selection was equally problematic; the insistent inclusion
of mediocre players like Obinna Nwaneri and Onyekachi Okwonkwo as well as the
useless Ayo Makinwa was inexplicable. The lack of depth on the bench
particularly in the midfield was underscored by the telling absence of any
replacement for Mikel. Strangely enough, it wasn’t that the eagles played
terribly. They were not the worst team of the tournament. It was just that this
time their best wasn’t good enough by several miles. In previous tournaments,
Nigeria could afford to stroll in, ill-prepared and rely on its assemblage of talent
to see it through. This time it wasn’t enough. The talent gap that used to
exist between Nigeria and other countries has closed.
The eagles huffed and puffed but theirs’ was a
paltry effort compared to the high standards of play on parade in the competition.
Nigeria seemed to have come to Ghana unjustifiably expecting to reach the final
and was shell-shocked by the general level and intensity of play. We couldn’t
beat Mali and we struggled to defeat Benin. The eagles played well initially
against Cote’d’Ivoire but once they fell behind to a wonder goal by Salomon
Kalou, they didn’t have the quality to get back into the game. Teams like
Angola and Guinea qualified at the expense of more fancied sides like Senegal
and Morocco. To Nigerian fans, their team’s difficulties were a novel
affliction but to seasoned watchers of the African and global game, it wasn’t
surprising at all. We pride ourselves on the fact that our players feature in
France, England and Spain. But things have changed in the fourteen years since
we last won the African cup. Virtually all African sides now boast of stars in
the European top flight. Even more alarming is the fact that Nigerians are no
longer found in the top bracket of the European game. With the exception of
John Mikel Obi of Chelsea, no other Nigerian footballer plies his craft in the
top grade cadre of Europe. We have no players in Barcelona (Cameroon has Samuel
Eto’o and Cote d’Ivoire has Yahaya Toure) or Real Madrid (Mali has Mamadu
Diarra) or Sevilla (Mali has both Freddie Kanoute, the reigning African
footballer of the year and Seydou Keita) or Arsenal (Togo has Emmanuel
Adebayor, Cote d’Ivoire has Emmanuel Eboue and Kolo Toure and Cameroon has Alex
Song). Only Mikel, Taye Taiwo of Olympique Marseille and Ifeanyi Emegara of
Steaua Bucharest have featured in the European Champions League this season. It
has been ages since a Nigerian player was voted African footballer of the Year.
Most of our celebrated stars like Kanu, Utaka and Martins are not first team
regulars for their clubs. The most impressive eagles in the tournament like
Danny Shittu and Osaze Odemwingie play for Watford and Lokomotiv Moscow
respectively, hardly the pinnacle of European football.
Besides all this, there was a missing leadership
element in the eagles’ play. Cote d’Ivoire had Drogba and the Toure brothers,
Ghana had Essien and Muntari, Egypt had Ahmed Hassan and Abu Terika and
Cameroon had Rigobert Song. While other highly rated African stars came to the
fore for their countries, our own stars were eclipsed by the occasion. Vogts
could provide no inspiration from the bench. The absence of leaders on the
pitch reflects a dreadful shortage of talent. Since the departures of Amuneke
and Finidi, we have had no quality wingers or flank midfielders. In particular,
since Amuneke, we have had no quality offensive left-footed player in the team.
Since Jay-jay Okocha and Sunday Oliseh retired, the eagles have had no
commanding midfield generals and no really great exponent of dead balls and
free kicks. Taiwo is currently our most decent taker of free kicks and Mikel
could eventually become a great midfielder but for now the eagles aren’t
soaring. The famed conveyor belt of Nigerian talent has broken down. Our local
league is in shambles. Since the days of Clemens Westerhof, we have not had a
manager with a flair for discovering raw talent and transforming them into
world class players. Finidi, Amokachi and Uche Okechukwu were all fished out
from the Nigerian league by Westerhof and transformed into African champions.
And even when talented sides win trophies like the Under 17 team coached by
late Yemi Tella did last year, rabid maladministration robs us of the
opportunity of building on such successes.
The Super Eagles played without passion or
commitment. Against Ghana with 30 minutes to go after the expulsion of John
Mensah, Nigeria ought to have pressed their advantage and killed off the game.
Instead their pace flagged allowing the ten-man Black Stars to take the
initiative. At one point, it seemed as though the eagles were a man short while
Ghana had twelve men on the pitch. Ghana had pride to play for in front of
thousands of their compatriots and their president; they gave everything and
richly deserved their victory. Nigeria couldn’t summon any reserves of grit and
determination to surmount the Ghanaian obstacle. Special mention needs to be
made of the remarkably unbiased officiating which saw a penalty awarded against
the home side and their captain expelled. This was a pleasantly surprising
advertisement of the growing maturity of African football. In spite of all
these manifestations of “divine intervention,” the eagles failed to capitalize
ensuring that the prayers of millions of Nigerian fans were wasted. Vogts’s
tactics were mystifying. With a one-man advantage, the German was bereft of
ideas. Rather than sending on Obafemi Martins, currently Nigeria’s most
prolific forward and John Utaka to pressure the beleaguered Black Stars defence
with their pace, he elected to leave them on the bench and substitute one
defensive midfielder, Etuhu, with another, Eromogbe. To compound matters, he
then took off Mikel, the most creative midfielder in the team and brought on
Nsofor whose entry into the fray was totally without impact.
The epiphany of this tournament is that Nigerian
football has now fallen below the continental standard in recent years. While
we missed the last World Cup, Angola (which qualified at our expense), Ghana,
Cote d’Ivoire, Togo and Tunisia all made it and learned valuable lessons from
the event. Their performances in Ghana 2008 reflected the progress of their
football. It is Nigeria that is out of touch with the strides made by the rest
of the continent in the last few years. Berti Vogts will most likely be sacked
and that is as it should be; failure at this level is costly and all managers
know this. But beyond this, there needs to be a radical reorganization of
domestic football administration starting with the privatization of the NFA and
the local league. It is significant that the superbly drilled Egyptian pharaohs
drew most of their players from the domestic league and were coached by an
indigenous manager. They were arguably the team of the tournament and
justifiably won the cup for the second time in a row. We do have some potentially
great managers in the wings but when measured with world class standards, they
fall short. Samson Siasia, Augustine Eguavoen, Stephen Keshi and even Sunday
Oliseh have the potential to be great managers. Keshi has already made his mark
by leading Togo to qualify for the 2006 World Cup and Siasia led the under 21s
to a second place finish in the 2005 junior World Cup. Eguavoen led the eagles
to a third place finish at the last nations cup in 2006; a result that looks so
respectable given the team’s recent atrocious performance. But Nigerian coaches
need stints in the European game where most of our players now feature to, at
least, broaden their horizons. We really do need to reform the F.A. as a matter
of urgent priority.
The corrupt cretins that have ruined Nigerian
football have to be flushed out of the administrative system. This is important
because corruption and mismanagement have made Nigeria grossly unattractive in
the world of international football. No world class coach will accept to work
in our chaotic environment. Vogts, who isn’t world class by any stretch of the
imagination, undoubtedly took on the job to make his comeback from the
wilderness. That gambit proved a disastrous failure. As things stand, it isn’t
beyond the bounds of possibility that Nigeria will fail to qualify for the next
world cup in South Africa in 2010. We no longer have the manpower that would
have made qualification a forgone conclusion. We are now haemorrhaging talent
at an alarming scale. Togo and Benin Republic feature a number of Nigerians in
their teams. Talented youngsters like Manchester City defender Nedum Onuoha and
Aston Villa forward, Gabriel Agbonlahor have apparently elected to pursue their
careers with England. By the 2010 World Cup, we could see Nigerians starring
for USA, England, Israel, Norway, Spain and Italy, not to mention Togo or some
other African country. These Nigerians feel that they cannot find
self-realization playing for their country. Before hiring another foreign or
local sacrificial lamb to manage the unmanageable, Nigeria must put its
football house in order.
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Posted by Robot| 11.02.2008 18:36