The Benin U-16 Coca-Cola Football team has
lifted the zone C trophy – the Coco-Cola Copa Cup.

To emerge champions, the Benin team
defeated Enugu, 2-0 in the finals played at the Samuel Ogbemudia Stadium.

The organisers of the tournament said they
used the FIFA Youth Football competition format of a round robin and knockout,
to select the champions of Zone C.

The zonal finals had four cities in
attendance,  Benin, Asaba, Imo and Enugu.

The Benin zonal champions would  now compete for medals and cash prizes at the
national finals to be staged at the Teslim Balogun Stadium, Lagos on May 27,
which is to coincide with the Children’s Day.

An ex-international, Waidi Akani, one of
the ambassadors of the tournament, advised the Nigeria Football Federation
(NFF) to deploy an ex-international to the region to scout for raw young
talents.

In an interview with newsmen  Akani, who was also the celebrity coach for
the Benin Zone, rated the competition high saying that the standard of the
games was impressive.

On how to groom the discovered talents, he
said: “we need to put their details on our database and follow their progress.

“Without this, we can’t achieve the aim for
which such competitions are organised.

“And this is why the NFF needs to send the
ex-internationals to regions and zones to scout for young raw talents because
everybody cannot be at the national level.

“The federation can deploy
ex-internationals to the different zones and through this method create jobs
for them to fish out talents, who will continually fill up the gaps in all the
national age group teams.

“This is what is obtainable elsewhere but
not in Nigeria,’’ he said, stressing regrettably, “it is at the federation
level that everybody wants to be. It should not be so. We should be in the
regions and zones.

“When I came here to Benin, I looked for
ex-internationals like Victor Igbinoba, Baldwin Bazuaye, Emmanuel Okocha and
Monday Eguavoen to help me out with selections.

He noted: “the worst mistake the federation
had made was in doing away with ex-internationals who had done well in the past
for the country.

“The federation needs to emphasise the need
to scout for ex-internationals and get them employed, so that they can  operate from regions and zones.

The
project manager Coca-cola Youth Soccer championship Femi Adelusi, said the
essence of the competition was to connect, engage and promote talents of teens
and young adults on a distinctive platform.