Can Nigeria Overcome Her Pitfalls To Achieve Football Glory?

It is no news that the African cup of Nations qualifier games have reached feverish peak with the Super Eagles of Nigeria billed to lock horns with its Guinean counterpart in a make or mar encounter come tomorrow.

In their last game, the Super Eagles of Nigeria defeated Madagascar and immediately a flurry of jubilation, chest thumping and boasting followed as if we are on top of our group or has even qualified for the mundial.

The truth is; by that victory over a lowly side like Madagascar, who even did not have anything to play for in that match, we are trailing behind Guinea with three points, making it compulsory for us to beat them tomorrow if we must have any chance of qualification.

Now you hear people say if we can win the match here and Guinea loses by so and so goal margin we will qualify. This is taking us back to the recent past when every football loving Nigerian became a prayer warrior or to say the least, pool forecaster involved in permutation;  perming two from five and vice versa just to ensure that the Super Eagles qualify.

Now, from the way things are going, it is obvious that we are back at the trenches again. This time around we better triple our prayers else we may not come out of the hole without our nose or head being reshaped. This is more so because the Guineans too can pray well to remain where they have gotten to by dint of hard work and good preparation.

We all started the qualification matches together and they overtook us. Now the same hard fighting Guinea team is coming to Abuja to play us. If they pull a draw here God forbid, we are finished, the hope of million football loving Nigerians like us would have been dashed. This makes it difficult investing hope on the Super Eagles. The question is: Can you spin your hopes on them?

What our repeated struggle to qualify tells us in the face is that even if our national team is grouped with non footballing nations like Sao Tome and Principe, we would still struggle to qualify.  Why this trend in our football?

The answer lies more in our football administration. It’s no longer needful to look up  the meaning of late preparation in the dictionary; it is well examplified in the way our football is being run. While some countries prepare for years to compete in major events, we usually start at feverish peak at the eleventh hour.

For instance, in the build up to the last World Cup at South Africa, we started serious preparation just few weeks to D-day and worst of all; we changed our coach and even the team amidst all the mudslinging and the clamour to satisfy all manner of interests.

Ultimately, we ended up not as the surprise team but as the surprised team. As our dreams faded, we were left with our ready-made excuse of bad coach or using the world cup as a laboratory to experiment for future projects and so on. While our neighbours, Ghana put in a superlative performance to the consternation of the world.

The problem with Nigerian football is that we have failed to accept that the system is flawed and programmed to always fail. We have always sown seeds of mediocrity and ignorance, apparently oblivious of the enormous potential of Nigerian football beyond our accomplishments on the field of play. Sadly, what we have achieved in the game so far, havemostly been by accident rather than design.

We neither truly merited them nor actually worked for them. We have to admit the truth that our success was achieved on the lure of the dollar in Europe, which attracted our players to clubs overseas and they come back fit and better to play matches for us.

The advent of Westerhof as catalyst to rebuilding our team in the early 90s around home-based players playing only at the local league and later top clubs in Europe remains the only testament to what Nigerian football became.

While we wallowed happily in the euphoria of all the strides of the 90s, lesser men, many of mediocre calibers, joined the band-wagon in search of their piece of the cake. Our football became heavily influenced by the luxury of misplaced government funding and the attendant undue interference.

What followed was the perennial appointment of a string of incompetent and self-seeking administrators in the cloak of NFA now NFF. We got men totally oblivious of the huge potential and marketability of the Nigerian game both locally and international circles. Sadly, they always went cap in hand begging for funds from ministers and literally handing control effectively back to them.

Nigerians enjoy the game of football. Despite our unceremonious exit from the first world cup on African soil,, we savoured the victory of flair over regimentation in South Africa as Spain beat Germany in the final, after a month of drama, theatrics, upsets, joyous fans, goals, and records, but the challenge for us is the future of Nigerian football and how we can be great again.

We have a big asset, a critical mass, a population estimated at over 150million soccer loving people. We have huge professional players abroad, even if we did not take Aiyegbeni or Kanu and his co travelers to the world cup. Nigeria has the tools, let us learn to use them.

In appraising our performance ahead of the future, our administrators usually take to blame game and buck passing. At the end of it all they will lapse into talks of sacking and hiring of Coaches, which will set the ball rolling for lobby and bringing in of the Lagaerbacks and Lagerbeers of this world as foreign coaches who will give us conditions of one month stay in abroad and one day stay in Nigeria, all in the name of scouting for players.

This is a bald and unsurprising lie, yet our administrators will accept with alacrity and give them big titles. We have been through this song-and-dance several times in the past, with the last being the title of technical adviser given to Lagerback. His performance was so abysmal such that public outrage about his choice by NFF became common place, forcing the Glass House to make a detour and midwifed the process that saw the engagement of Coach Siasia.

If any one takes a look at the records of some of the Coaches that once strode our football as foreign coaches, it could be seen that they are yet to be engaged by any country or even club for any serious coaching job since they left the shores of Nigeria, which point to the fact that they are spent forces that were simply repackaged and brought to us as coaches. These expired coaches found some members of our Football House as willing tools to pave way for their coming here with a view to using our football to revive their coaching career that was approaching its expiry.

My position is simply that we need to examine the structure and funding of football in Nigeria. There cannot be a better opportunity to cleanse our football than this period, after we have been brought down to earth with a bang in the last world cup and now struggling for a nation’s cup ticket.

In this era of privatization, we call upon government to be bold and stop funding football. This will discourage all the politics, politicking and court injunctions and counter injunctions associated with running football in Nigeria and save the game. Think of all the money spent by corporate bodies falling over each other to get sponsorship or rights of association with the world cup and the Nation’s cup – surely they can also be persuaded through sound organization to also extend to other aspects of the game.

The truth is that success comes only through long term planning, preparation and transparency. This, we are not doing at the moment. I pray that the outcome of tomorrow’s Nation’s cup qualifying decider proves me wrong. Let the cookie not crumble, because if it does, there will not be enough pieces for fair-weather pretenders running our football in this country.

Asi Prince Dateme