Last Sunday, I did a piece slated for, which was to highlight a particular beauty or if you like take away from the Christmas. It related to confronting problems head on. The matter was dear to my heart for various reasons including the dangerous limiting attitude of identifying challenges very clearly, knowing the solution but shying away from its implementation. It is more painful when one observes we celebrate events which contain seeds of useful lessons regarding our problems, yet all we do here is celebrate those events without taking in the imports. If we did some of us can bet our lives that things won’t be what they are currently. The situation would definitely have been far better.
The occasion of Christmas has political relevance; very instructive lessons we can take to improve our transformational efforts, one of them I already said which is repeated: man ought to confront her challenges head on, no gain in hiding under excuses or subterfuges of all kinds to gain personal and group advantage at huge expense of national good and advancement. God found a task, He threw away protocol and came directly to straighten crooked paths. This is a major knowledge we should take in and hold very dear if we truly are serious to move our society from Third World to First World status.
We are all witnesses to what we do with our major challenges, how inept we handle very crucial matters of development and still turn around to expect huge records of successes.Take the challenge of insecurity for instance: some statistics hold that every day at least not less than 30 persons die in very controversial circumstances across the country, yet we are contented with dilly dallying over what should be top priority matter of state, and choosing to defer indefinitely the democratization of security which would have provided immediate answer and met the dictates of federalism. This is a deeply plural society but we don’t want to hear restructuring yet if we are very honest to ourselves the country is not only bleeding it is rapidly unraveling.
The funny thing is like the ostrich we pretend all is well when clear harm assails us from all corners. The economic space is closing up every day. The Electoral Act which helped us work harder to have in place a credible electoral process has become a source of bad politics, with top leaders offering options unknown to scholarly postulations or even practical experience elsewhere for why the bill should remain in the minds of the authors. How do party members voting in their party primaries constitute a security threat when general elections hold regularly in Bornu State, the epicenter of Boko Haram insurgency? This and more I wanted us to review last week but it couldn›t be, so we move on.
Today, I made a choice to discuss socials, what some of those vast in political development call residual matters. I am not certain if some of us agree with the term, especially as it relates to sports and music but this debate will be left for another day. The issue is football, the African Nations Cup, starting in Cameroon from January 9 to February 6, 2022 and the participation of our national team the Super Eagles. The team has been in a quandary since the German/Franco coach, Gernot Rohr, mounted the saddle more than five long years ago. His sack on eve of this tournament has naturally raised questions as to whether the action was right, done at the right time and if our team can be in a very competitive mood.
Some say coaches are judged by performance, as long as they win marches they should stay on. The r is some truth in that; coaches can be judged by quality brought to bear on what they do, they are also as acceptable as the shape of their very recent outings. When some of us say sports and music are not residual matters we hold the view on the basis that they are also very vital aspects of societal life; they are developmental issues touching on the lives of citizens in a peculiar way. Not all citizens would become professors and not all will turn out to be corporate or business chieftains. Many talented citizens would have to earn distinction playing on these aspects of human existence. This is downplaying the entertainment and national pride rewards. What this means is that quality development should be an issue all the time. Under Rohr, Super Eagles quality went to the winds. Forget the fact all our players ply their trade abroad, Rohr got us a team of mainly average players. In five years he added nothing either technically or tactically, he even destroyed our football tradition which our teams at all levels is the toast of football fans worldwide. Rohr won matches because most of the teams were of no football significance besides we are rich in talent otherwise it took us too long we showed him the exit door. Removing him before AFCON is to save him and us the shame that was already building up.
The search for a world class coach is ideal, some of us accept this option on the condition that we don›t have leaders who think in a revolutionary manner otherwise it should not be about winning at all cost, it should rather be more about grooming our players from home under a local coach, setting targets and pushing them out to go and work out the glory. If they they succeed fine, and if they don›t, we learn, return to correct our mistakes for better performance next time. This is how to have sustainable development but this is not what we do. That is the exact reason our sport representatives are those groomed by outside countries especially the developed countries.
In this regard let a tested foreign coach step in, but with regard to AFCON let him be given the role of an assistant coach role; by this he will observe and offer some advice during the competition; he takes over once the team is back from the tournament. Let the competition offer him direct opportunity to see our players in action, assist him see team formation, tactics, depth of techniques and player ability. Would our team have a great competition? I don’t think so, in fact many of us are not expecting a very good outing from this team.
The reasons are obvious: the jolt associated with Rohr will have effect, tactics must change add that to observation made earlier that most of the boys in the reckoning of some of us are average players. There are no game changers in the team, players whose individual efforts in terms of creative play, pace, dribbling skills, runs off ball can change the direction and tempo of a game. The scorers are not the killer types, Musa is a shadow of his old self, that he made the team is a wonder to some of us, the team would require a different kind of formation where a creative midfield does most of the work and then put the strikers through with well directed killer passes. The truth is that the current Super Eagles team does not have the kind of midfield we had during the days of Muda Lawal and JJ Okocha in our national team. Great nations some of us have watched recently have them.
Some of us have not seen solid defenders in the team, those there are not equipped enough to run efficiently through hotly contested tournaments like AFCON will offer. We don›t have a goalkeeper that commands presence and assurance.Talk about mentality, in all their matches we never saw the zeal to win, they waste so much time doing the throws and taking spot kicks ;the team lacks pace and grit which are very essential tools for football at the big stage. Rohr spent five long years wasting everyone’s time and our resources without qualitative input into the national team. He took all of five years to build a team he kept describing as young team. Players kept changing.
Austin Eguavon, the interim coach, should be supported to see what he can make from the team at the competition. He would have to draw on his experience or else not much changes can be effected in just 10 days of training. If Super Eagles are to make impact, answers must be found to some basic things. First would be individual and team mentality, what we see is contentment playing on big stage beyond this nothing much in terms of fierce desire to win come what may; the other would be physical fitness, the team must improve on her contest for the ball as well as pace at moving forward and returning when they lose the ball, champion players hardly walk when much is at stake in a game, they must be pacy and show they are there to beat any team. There must be well rehearsed system of connecting the strikers. Under Rohr the team scored mostly what many of us consider lucky goals, goals that were not outcomes of deliberate cultivated efforts.
A key characteristic of a great team is that even the lowly fans can tell when a goal is about being scored, everyone can see it coming. Our team can surprise us if they choose to rise to the occasion. We will be happy if they do and they have to because not so much hype is built around them going into this competition, consequence of below par performance. This tournament offers the players opportunity to rewrite the story and redeem their image and that of our country. This is important also, the media unit around the team should be reorganized, made more proactive and very creative. Our team is not getting good enough pre-tournament reviews even SuperSports the station with the right to beam live matches couldn’t find one great star from Super Eagles to place among the first four players it is using to hype the competition. Our answer can only come via great performance. Nigerians love football and we will be watching to see if any thing will change about our Super Eagles beginning with that first match with Egypt. Good test.