| Build Eagles around
home-based players
By COSMAS OMEGOH
Saturday, November 4, 2006
Ex-Green Eagles’ player, Kenneth Okechukwu Boardman,
has made a renewed call for the Super Eagles to be built largely
around home-based players. He said the idea was worth giving
a trial because it would help the team to build and blend
faster, just as it would end the troubles our coaches often
face while raising a squad.
In an interview with Saturday Sunsport, Boardman,
who broke into the Green Eagles in 1981 from Flying Eagles,
decried the Super Eagles’ perennial problem of raising
a full squad ahead of crucial matches, saying, such never
happened in his days.
According to him, that remains the distinguishing factor between
the then national team and the present Super Eagles. He said
the rot has remained every coach’s nightmare, because
our players are based overseas, a fact he maintained was novel
in his days in the national team.
“When I look back at the Green Eagles I played for between
1981 and 1983 and the current Super Eagles, I see they are
eras apart,” the right back player began. “But
I can tell you, the era in which I played was better because
there was stability in the team.
“In those days, not may players were coming from abroad
to play for the team. It was perhaps, only Tunji Banjo that
was the visible foreign-based player then.
“All of us in the team were based at home, and for that
singular reason, the team was strong. You could see it in
the quality of the Green Eagles that lifted the African Nations
Cup in 1980. Every member of the squad was virtually home-based.
“In some African countries like Egypt, that is the practice.
The national team is build around the home-based players.
The idea helps the team to build, unite and blend faster.
With that arrangement, you don’t have to worry about
the absence of any foreign-based players, which is usually
the headache of our national team coaches.
“We can borrow from this idea and work towards having
a standing home-based national team we can rely upon at any
time.”
But these days the bulk of Super Eagles’ players play
for oversea clubs, Boardman, who ended his playing career
at Kortrick FC of Belgium in 1991, said the Nigeria Football
Association (NFA) needed to do much to manage the team.
The Onitsha-born ex-defender said it was sad the NFA has not
been able to effectively manage the team, leading to occasional
failures to raise a formidable team whenever the need arises.
“The reigning thing these days is that almost every
national team player plays abroad. That is not peculiar to
Nigeria, it is the same scenario all over the world. But it
is sad it often constitutes problem to our soccer administrators
whereas it could be managed. Other countries of the world
like Brazil and Argentina are coping nicely with it. We too
can do it.
“We just have to copy useful ways of managing our players,
so that they can answer to national calls. When we do that,
we would save ourselves a lot of embarrassment,” he
concluded. |
