Tony Okerafor
8 November 2009
Has any Lagos-based football fan bothered to ask why the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) have not staged any match involving any of our national teams for a very long time now? Since the Super Eagles lost to the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon at the final of Ghana-Nigeria-2000 right at the National Stadium, Lagos, one can't remember the senior national team having played another game, whether friendly or competitive, in the nation's former capital city.
The reason, in part, is that players are known to have complained about the behaviour of the average Lagos spectator: aggressive, impatient, threatening and fastidious.
But, come to think of it! Isn't the same attitude gradually creeping into fan-bases in the rest of the country? The answer must be in the affirmative, because at the Abuja National Stadium, during one of the opening games of Nigeria-2009, particularly the Nigeria-Germany match, you could see and hear sections of the crowds booing our lads, from the time the Germans scored their first goal up till their third. It was a shameful sight to behold, that Nigerians could actually be cheering the opposing team, when all they needed to do, as patriotic sons and daughters of the soil, was to use their voices, their hands and their instruments to inspire their own team.
It's a most disgraceful sight to behold, because no German or British or Argentine journalist is going to praise you for ridiculing your team, since their own fans won't be that unpatriotic, even in the face of defeat.
Not once, not twice, but, umpteently, I've reason to remind Nigerian spectators about a unique and praise-worthy demonstration of patriotism and national pride at Chile '87. As hosts, the Chilean U-20 side was playing a rather hopeless game against Germany.
Mildly put, the match was a rout, and the tournament was at the semi-final stage. Four-goals-to-nothing was the outcome. Every minute of the game, even as the relentless Germany attack kept pumping goals into the net of the home side, the fans kept cheering their team on, in the hope that they would stage a come-back, which never happened. As the final whistle sounded, the fans rose up in unison, waiving Chilean flags and crying "Chile! Chile! Chile!," as if their team had won the game.
Where, for goodness sake, does the Nigerian mentality come from? Nigerians are passionate about football, and no one can dispute the fact that they always want their darling teams to win. In short, the average Nigerian soccer fan loves and appreciates good football, and knows one when he sees it. But, most times, he is passive in the stands, and, as the late Ernest Okonkwo once put it, "only reacts when a goal has been scored" and does not "know how to motivate the scoring of a goal." This, one must say, is a heavy indictment on our attitude to things Nigerian and will not, by any means, portray us in good light, as we play host to the rest of the soccer fraternity.
Against the Germans, these bunch of Golden Eaglets did not fare badly at all, even before their own goals started coming, nor will anybody have any reason to accuse them of not doing very well against their other Group A opponents Argentina and Honduras. One reason for saying so is this: for the first time since this competition first took off twenty-four years ago in China, this might just be the first Nigerian squad whose members are truly close to the U-17 age-group! Thanks to the new MRI scan which FIFA introduced to check cheating by countries. As a matter of fact, these lads, our Golden Eaglets, haven't even been together for more than three months, ahead of this competition, because the squad had to be tinkered, overhauled, in fact, rebuilt almost from scratch, after the results of FIFA's MRI tests caused nearly half of the boys originally invited to camp to be dropped, so close to the commencement of the tournament. Here, we may blame the NFF for that crisis, not the team. Besides, during the short space of time within which they were to prepare for this championship, how many tune-up matches did the Eaglets play, whether against quality European, South American, Asian or African opposition? Very, very few indeed. And that's why the boys showed little cohesion, especially during the first half of that opening game against the Germans. So, go, Nigerians, go and cheers the boys to victory.
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