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Let us talk sports today. National attention has been rightly over-focused on politics for the simple reason that politics drives the other sectors of national life. Every development rises or falls with leadership. Even football we intend to discuss once again, its progress or otherwise rests with the attitude and policies of government.
At this point, a few truths would be necessary concerning our football development. Exactly 63 years after independence, we still grope in the dark concerning what to do with football and about football development. Forget what sports administrators mouth each time we or circumstances box them into a tight corner, our country has no football development policy. None exists anywhere.
When issues throw themselves up, especially if it is related to money, it is at that point we have our football administrators come out with all kinds of policies just to deceive and scale through the hurdles. Once they have their way we return to our state of no progress. Routine procedures continue, and leagues are without well-defined directions and well-defined intentions. There are no substantive imaginative inputs that can grow the game in the country. We rely on raw talents so commonplace in every corner of the country, we forget that talent alone doesn›t go far; we need honing too to get them to be competitive and very rewarding.
Having so many talents in our space is what has sustained our position as a «football» playing country otherwise we would have been written off long ago. We have stopped school competitions for apparently no good reason. Private initiatives now do what government agencies should do, which is to set examples and standards just as we see in America, China, Japan and other countries where football wasn›t taken seriously but within a short time have become countries to reckon with in world football hierarchy.
Our arrangement is unique in disorder. We had made this point earlier. It is the pathway to no growth and no achievement. Individuals scout for talents from the streets and also run a few football academies dotting some parts of the country. What happens is that profit becomes the main motive that supersedes far higher national ideals of national development, growth, rewards and pride. So, individual whims dictate what happens. One danger of this setup is individual expectations stand as national policy.
The consequences flowing from the above are enormous. The first would be a country without a playing pattern. If Egypt, Morocco, Ghana, Cote D›Ivoire, Senegal and Cameroon just to mention a few are to play a match, teams against them know what to expect and if the game is already on and one just tuned in, you can hazard a guess as to which team is on display and it would turn out to be very correct. Same thing on the larger world stage. Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, England, France and Portugal can be easily identified out on the field of play without the names of their countries coming through the match commentators.
These have their peculiar playing styles. These countries don›t wait for tournaments to know what is wrong with their teams. They only undertake critical reviews of recent encounters, take critical lessons thrown up by statistics, look at the team pattern try to find out what is missing in terms of players› strength and particularly flexibility in some positions and find new players that can fit in.
In our case, things work in the opposite direction. We are not certain how our leagues should go. The way we have acted on this score many are of the view if the league system wasn›t a commonplace procedure we wouldn›t have seen the sense to have one established in the country. In many instances, clubs are not sure when the different tiers of our league will take off and end. No good policy on player welfare. Facilities are hardly in place and when they are built, standards become a big issue. In African club football tournaments, our clubs are no longer forces to be reckoned with. match-up against North African teams sends a shiver down spines. For Nigeria, the supposed giant of Africa, things ought not to be so.
Countries with football policies do things in a more scientific and sophisticated manner The structure for picking football administrators is clear. It can only change on the side of well-considered progress. Filling administrative positions is devoid of the kind of struggles and rancour we experience in our clime. Facilities and skilled manpower remain in the topmost priorities. Moreover, facility maintenance is part of national policy. North African countries and South Africa have become great examples. Morocco currently is on top. It is doing internal development, putting facilities in place and getting it very right, proving in the process that football development for national rewards is not the rocket science we have made of it in our country.
Technically, they keep proving to be great examples. In one of the recent African Nations Cup tournaments held in Cameroon, we saw the Egyptian goalkeeper hide in a water bottle match strategies. We saw they had specific things written about players to square against them including how they take penalty kicks. The revelation was instructive. This for many of us was indicative of how far countries that mean business can go to prepare their teams for international games. We have not seen signs that the same rigour is applied to our teams. We gather “borrowed” hands, give them a few days of training, many times without a psychological boost and throw them into the big competition expecting the best. Finally, local players should be the foundation for building great national teams. Assembling foreign-based players is no crime but what is wrong is what we have already seen in the absence of cohesion, team tactics and the win-or-die spirit. The pattern kills football development.
It also creates a dependency syndrome. It is the main reason why when one player abroad is injured it becomes big news. The approach furthers inconsistencies in terms of the style of play. More serious would be the fact that it monetises football at that level, destroys internal initiatives and kills off patriotism and passion that emanate from it. This explains the absence of a “do or die” attitude in other teams which is missing in ours. Most of our players have little emotional attachment to Nigeria. Even though they are of Nigerian parentage, they lack attachments, and we don’t blame them. In truth, it is difficult to bond with an environment one hasn’t had much direct contact with.
We must begin to identify creative talents which abound in every corner of the country and take pains to groom them to stardom. They may in the end migrate but they become very familiar with home culture, African sports emotions and not forgetting playing patterns and mentality. Building up talents will conserve frittering away of foreign exchange which we know will remain very scarce for a long time to come. It will help build up our home teams because most of the stars will remain when they know they can get the same reward as those who run abroad. It will increase the football support base which would mean more material gains for all including the country. Isn’t it surprising we don’t have local coaches who can succeed each other in many of our national teams.? This on its own ought to be a major national concern
It is appalling we talk of players and what we have against the team›s pattern, tactics and techniques. Some of us know a bad coach when he joins ordinary folks to boast about quality players and not place emphasis on systems, techniques and tactics.
The truth about football is that a team of very average players with a system, fine tactics and techniques will triumph over a team of stars without the factors mentioned earlier. North African teams don›t usually have so much big in football but their teams always know what to do in terms of game management and organization.
Those teams know when to take on the pace, start slow and increase the tempo when to slow down a game, kill it off or make smooth play difficult for opponents. Those teams create attacks that bring goals. Emphasis for them is not on particular strikers, they walk in the ball and any player can score. Keen observers see them crowd the goal area when they have possession. Spot kicks mean a lot to them
Juxtapose the highlighted points with our Super Eagles, especially under Jose Peseiro. For some of and we are many we don’t have a team. The players are great and top-notch but there is no bonding, we don’t see tactics and techniques. The coach is in the habit of ruing goals not scored but we have not seen clear patterns that produce goals, we leave everything to player ability. Our strikers haven’t yet shown the ability team to make maximum use of half chances.
On a final note, some of us don›t place high hopes on the current players to excel in the African Nations Cup scheduled for Ivory Coast in January. Champion teams have established tradition which is not the case with current Eagles. The Super Eagles team under Peseiro hasn’t done well in encounters against grade-A teams. Playing Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Ethiopia and the rest isn’t where the meat lies. It is taking on the big teams, playing convincingly and winning that we can look up and begin to cheer. The Eagles team I see offers no hope.
