New Telegraph

Minister’s riot act and Nigeria’s football development

The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) is saddled with the task of administration of the beautiful round leather game in the country. The federation relies on the status of international football body, FIFA, to run the game. The NFF Board is the supreme body which also takes orders from the Ministry of Sports when it comes to crucial national decisions on finance, security, venues and other logistics of the game. We recall in 2016, the federation engaged a foreign coach, Gernot Rohr, to take charge of the Super Eagles.

Sad enough, there has not been a strong stand to regulate the operations of the foreign coach. Last week, Minister of Sports, Sunday Dare, came out strong to kick against the lackadaisical attitude of Rohr and his negative disposition to the domestic league players. During his visit to the camp of the Super Eagles Team B in Abuja, the minister was angry that Rohr, who should be preparing the team, travelled ahead and left the team for the NFF’s Technical Director, Austin Eguavoen.

Dare said: “We cannot have the technical coach who will discriminate amongst our players, they are football players, they have talent, you can’t discriminate, his attitude towards home-based players is unacceptable, and it’s negative to our football development in this country.

“I call on the NFF to call him to order, to hold him to the content of his contract, but beyond that, he needs to shut up, and do the work he was hired to do, he talks too much. I am an advocate of the home-based talents, because I have seen so many of them play, we have the talents here. Few months ago, after the game in Benin, I had a meeting with the NFF in my office and part of the things we discussed was the need for the technical adviser to pay attention to our local league, the Premier League especially, to identify our stars, and blend them into the Super Eagles level.”

We expect the Amaju Pinnick-led NFF should have been the body putting heat on Rohr but now it is the sports minister who has to intervene to also assert authority on behalf of the President, Muhammadu Buhari. On many occasions, Rohr displays a carefree attitude on developmental issues about the country’s football and NFF as the employers turn deaf ears to the misdemeanours of the coach. Now that the riot act is coming from the minister, we expect that the NFF will take a second look at the overall operations of Rohr regarding his role as the technical head of the Super Eagles.

We believe at 68, Rohr is battling with his old age as the Eagles handler because the modern trend is to have young coaches at the helm of affairs of national teams and also clubs to achieve success. It is sad that the NFF, even as the employers of Rohr, cannot talk to the coach on the template expected for the national team. It is indeed strange that Rohr is like a ‘supremo’ that is untouchable. He came up with a list of invited players without any input in terms of checks from the technical arm of the NFF. Rohr is not a Nigerian and he is perhaps not bothered about the future of football in the country.

There should be a developmental template and a pattern in the Eagles. The way things are, Rohr sets up the team to get results in the games he plays in order to keep his job but there is need for much more. After being in charge for six, there is still no discerning pattern in the Eagles’ play while the coach has been unable to give Nigerians a solid team. He keeps rebuilding with every FIFA window and till date, no one is certain about the first 11 of the team. Eagles need consistency and cohesion which can only be guaranteed if Rohr has his best 11 or best 18 players.

The domestic league players cannot be ruled out of the process; there should be a deliberate effort to expose them and make the best in the NPFL flourish in the Super Eagles. We recall that the downward trend of Nigerian football has been a major factor in the evaluation of sports in the country in the past few months. It is easy to look at the results in sports and so in all cases, every event is important because the outcome could be a setback that could affect the entire industry.

Nigeria’s domestic football league has been under fire because the country has failed to be at the top in the continental cup competitions while the league itself is not being administered the way it was expected to conform with the other leagues abroad, especially England which we were told the Nigeria Professional Football League is modelled after. We expect that in concrete terms we should see signs to show that the NPFL is following the template of the EPL.

We also need structures and plans that could give the players hope of having a chance of playing for the national team in future. For us, the results being posted in the home-based Nations Cup (CHAN) and continental club competitions are unacceptable and should be a worry to the NFF and Rohr. It is only when they take the development of the game seriously from the domestic scene in Nigeria that we can hope for an improved development of the game in the country.

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