P.M. News (Lagos)
Nnamdi Okosieme
13 February 2002
opinion
Lagos — Much has been said and written in recent times about the performance of the Super Eagles. All have centred largely around the question of the age of some key players and its implications for the performance of the team.
During the World Cup 2002 qualifiers, Nigerians deplored the performance of the Eagles, blaming it on the ageing players thatBonfrere Jo and later Shuaibu Amodu decided to retain in the team. The same thing happened at the just concluded Nations Cup in Mali.
The expectations of Nigerians had been that the Eagles, given its pedigree at the Nations Cup, would dispatch its group opponents with relative ease. What they saw, however, was a Super Eagles that had to dip repeatedly into its bag of tricks to overcome its lowly-rated opponents. And like during the World Cup qualifiers, the issue of age has cropped up again.
As an observer who has followed the Eagles for some time, I make bold to say that the problem with the Super Eagles, if indeed it can be called a problem, is not the age of the players.
What we are faced with is the problem of attitude and commitment. An assessment of the Super Eagles players' performances for their various clubs in the last three to four months, at least, shows that these boys have been playing very well. This, they could not have achieved in the very competitive and result-driven European leagues if they were battling with age.
Kanu Nwankwo, George Finidi, Austin Okocha and Taribo West, to take a few of the much-touted "tired legs", are central in the calculations of their teams' coaches. If Kanu were not doing well at Highbury, Arsene Wenger would not have held onto him until the very last minute before the Nations Cup commenced. Finidi, we all know, has been scoring some great goals at Portman Road.
The important question to ask is, why do these players not reproduce the same form when playing for the national team? This brings me to the issue of attitude I mentioned earlier.
A number of reasons can be adduced for this development. In the first place, these players earn so much playing for their clubs that they naturally want to justify such huge amounts. Anything to the contrary means they would lose first team place and consequently find themselves in the transfer market.
This brings us to a related factor. The question of injury. We have all seen in recent times the increasing reluctance on the part of European clubs to release Nigerian players for national assignments. When players get released after much hard bargaining between the club and country, the last thing they would want is to go back to their clubs with injuries sustained while playing for the national team. So, what we get is often a below-average performance from the players.
On the matter of injury, we are all witnesses to the attitude of Nigeria football administrators to players injured while on national assignments. The sad cases of Nduka Ugbade, Monday Eguavoen and John Omughele (the man who scored the winning goal in Kumasi in Nigeria's 1984 defeat of Ghana on its soil) are glaring reminders of how players have been cast aside by the national team after years of meritorious service.
We come to a very important issue. The question of patriotism. Following from what is seen as the lack of commitment to the national team by the players, they have repeatedly been labelled as unpatriotic by both soccer fans and football administrators themselves.
Are the players really unpatriotic or is it a case of giving a dog a bad name in order to find a good pretext to hang it? Are the football administrators who have repeatedly withheld players' allowances and bonuses patriotic? These are important questions indeed and until we can answer them, we will not be able to find a solution to the problem of commitment to the national team by our players.
Let us recall Sam Okwaraji. Here was one player who died while on national duty. It's almost 13 years since he slumped and later died. Till date, no administration in the country has considered him fit for a post-humous award. What you have instead is the celebration of criminals and others who have stolen the country blind.
To move away from football. During the Sydney 2000 Olympics, sprinter Hyginus Anugo so much wanted to represent this country that in spite of being dropped from Nigeria's official contingent to the games, he still found his way there. He participated in a number of meets there in order to make the prescribed Olympic standard.
When Anugo died after being run over by a moving vehicle, the first response of Nigerian officials in Sydney was that Anugo was not part of Nigeria's official delegation to the games. This was done perhaps to avoid the responsibility for the burial of the late athlete.
In Nigeria, patriotism has become invested with all sorts of meanings that the sacrifices of genuine patriots often go unheralded. How many Nigerians can today put a job that pays a whopping £25,000 a week on the line to play on undulating pitches that could easily get one injured like Kanu Nwankwo has done?
It is time we realised that besides being players, our Super Eagles are human beings with feelings like everybody else. The fact is that, too often we set standards for them which we do not set for ourselves and other public officials.
All that have been said however, do not mean a whole-hearted endorsement of players' attitude. In so far as they have constraining factors, the fact remains that some of them have failed to reciprocate the goodwill of Nigerian football fans who have kept faith with them all these years.
Nigerian players have to exhibit a sense of maturity and propriety when on national duty. The Americans have a saying to the effect that those who cannot stand the heat should get out of the kitchen. When a player feels like some of them do, that he has reached the point where he no longer derives any satisfaction from playing for the country, then such a player should throw in the towel and let others who have the itch to represent the country do so. Thankfully George Finidi made his intention of quitting after the world cup known before going to Mali.(ACONS)
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