Segun Odegbami |
A friend, a foremost sports journalist, called me up last week from Abuja to inform me that he was racing to the office of the Minister of Sports to inform him of his decision to lead a national campaign to sack Jose Paseiro, the Portuguese coach of the Super Eagles. He wanted my urgent opinion.
Of course, I do not take decisions in a hurry, nor in a
panic mode. I also do not swim with the tide of opinion based on emotional or
sentimental outbursts, or be part of a mob action baying for the blood of a
foreign or local coach, when everything around is skewed against any form of
success.
I politely told him I had no opinion yet on the matter and
would make it public when I do. That’s what I am doing now.
A new star is born!
I have traversed a similar path in the past, and got burnt
by the power of narrower interests and personalities that have run and ruined
Nigerian football for many years.
The core of the matter is that the Super Eagles are not
winning their matches. Even easy ones. As far as the people are concerned,
these last two drawn matches are ‘failures’ and someone must pay for them.
That person is Jose Paseiro. I won’t completely fall for
such sentiments now. The Super Eagles should win AFCON 2023. They should also
qualify for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Let’s look at some of the issues that can
truncate these goals.
Domestic Nigerian football.
There is no depth to the country’s domestic football. They
were neglected for too long by successive football federation boards. The
boards concentrated on the more personally ‘lucrative’ Super Eagles. They
feasted on the fruits without properly feeding the roots. The tree eventually
and inevitably weakened and withered, having been deprived of nutrients
essential for development of players for a career in the domestic leagues –
good nurseries, organisation, integrity, infrastructure, capacity building programs,
adequate funding, great welfare packages, and so on. The only available
ingredient has been the endless sea of young uncut diamonds in Nigerian
players. Ironically, these players are doing everything to flee the country for
greener pastures and better opportunities in other parts of the world, and not
to strengthen the domestic leagues.
This uncontrolled migration has made nonsense of any attempt
to build a serious national team of local players. The failure of the big clubs
in the country to win any continental laurels confirms this. That is why all
the recent foreign coaches employed don’t take the route of the domestic
leagues to seek players for the national teams. The calibre of players is just
not there.
So, Paseiro, like the others before him, concentrates on
observing Nigerian players in the various leagues in Europe. He assembles the
best of them that he finds to form the country’s Super Eagles. He also only has
two days before most matches to work with the players before matches, making it
impossible to build a team with any level of organised play, pattern and
understanding. You do not build solid teams that way. They must have some time
to train together, understand each other, be infused with a planned style and
philosophy, and made to play several matches. That’s the only way a good team
can emerge.
Under the present circumstances, the Super Eagles do not
have such luxury. Coaches have been on this impossible mission for well over a
decade.
AFCON and the World Cup are the only championships that
provide a little time for the team to train together, to play some friendlies,
to become a unit. The team uses the earlier group matches of the championship
to get better.
That’s what happened during the transition between Gernot
Rohr and Austin Eguavoen. A good team started to evolve during the group
matches of AFCON 2021, only for the process to be disrupted by a difficult
match and a costly error that saw the Eagles exit rather uncharacteristically
‘prematurely’. The baby and the bath water were thereafter thrown into the
gully of history. The result is to begin-again.
That’s how Jose Paseiro came in to inherit an impossible and
unchangeable situation. For as long as the present system is not changed, no
coach in the world can change the fortunes of the Super Eagles. The best he can
do is what Gernot Rohr and, now, Jose Paseiro have been doing – not wasting
time on the local players from the domestic league (they are not good enough
for the national team without additional exposure and training in Europe),
scanning Europe for players of Nigerian descent, assembling the best of them
for the short periods of time before matches that can NEVER make them a good
team with organizational depth, and then going on their knees to pray for
undeserved victories. They win some and lose most!
So, Nigerians are disappointed and angry, and bay for the
blood of successive coaches.
Yet, deep down, the issues have roots in other issues. A
proper study by proper experts is necessary.
Arm-chair critics masquerading as experts whose noise-making
rises above the din of common sense and more careful interrogations blur proper
and more meaningful conversations.
Meanwhile, the present Super Eagles are not strong in two
major areas of the field – the mid-field and goalkeeping.
There is little that can be done about the team’s strength
without the influence of a few players with exceptional skills and ability in
certain areas of the team. Presently, there is a dearth of creative and
attacking midfield players who can hold and distribute the balls well.
Goalkeeping has become a problem only because Paseiro
refuses to see the difference between an efficient goalkeeper and one whose
only qualification is his physical frame.
The last goal conceded against Zimbabwe, scored directly
from a free kick 30 metres from his goal clearly exposed Uzoho’s weakness. It
is an elementary goalkeeping error.
Finally, Nigeria should not panic and take decisions that
will not impact anything, will not change the Super Eagles and will not provide
guaranteed outcomes.
This is the time to be cool, calm and calculated.
Nigeria is blessed with a lot of good players presently.
With a little bit of luck, more patience and the time shortly before AFCON 2023
used properly to build a stronger team, plus the return of one of the deadliest
strikers on the planet, Victor Osimhen, in the team, Nigeria shall improve
steadily into AFCON 2023.
In January, the team will use the group matches of the
championship to get better, and possibly go on to win AFCON 2023. They will
then gain the essential confidence to play more consistently and (at the end of
AFCON) establish a stronger team that shall be able to go into the World Cup
qualifying matches with more strength and purpose, and qualify for the World
Cup as true champions of African football.
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