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Nigeria: Beijing 2008 - Dream Team, Tie Shaky
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This Day (Lagos)
7 July 2008
Posted to the web 8 July 2008
Femi Solaja
Lagos
Strong indications emerged yesterday that Nigeria's Olympic male football team, Dream Team IV may not play any meaningful friendly match before the start of the tournament next month because even the anticipated tie against Iran may not see the light of the day after all.
A top official of the team revealed to THISDAYSports yesterday that the technical officials have prepared themselves for the worst situation of not playing any tune up match before the Olympics.
They are now looking at the possibility of leaving early for South Korea ahead of other members of Team Nigeria, mainly athletics, boxing, teakwando and judo who will jet out of the country early next week.
"It will be a big relief if the Iran tie takes place. The feelers we are getting is not encouraging and in order not to be caught off guard, we have started processing South Korean visas for the team. Hopefully we will leave for Seoul this Thursday where we will have our final preparatory matches against some selected sides," the official explained.
The team was forced to cancel a trip to the US last week after the issue of securing visas became a problem. This was coming on the heels of the cancellation of an earlier trip to USA in March.
It was learnt that it was around this time that the Iran offer came up. However, because the team was more interested in travelling to America no effort was made to firm up the offer from Tehran.
It was only when it be came clear that the US trip was no longer visible that fresh efforts were made to sound out the Iranians, who were no longer able to accommodate the Nigerian team in their plans.
So far the only major preparation undertaken by the team was the recent camping in Portugal which was almost also cancelled at the last minute.
Nigeria, winners of the football tournament at Atlanta'96, is aiming to hoping to achieve the same feat in Beijing. The team will play in the same group alongside, Holland, USA and Japan.
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Other two other African representatives in the tournament are Cote d' Ivoire and Cameroon.
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