Let us for purpose of arguments assume that they are right to say Keshi needs an assistant. What manner of assistant will the NFF provide Keshi ?
What is it that the present crew lacks? Just because a 10-man Ghana national team beat the Super Eagles does not pale into insignificance all the good jobs that Keshi has done in just two years that he was hired.
Perhaps we have forgotten so soon that at the 2008 Nations Cup in Accra, Ghana, Nigeria was beaten by the same margin by a 10-man Black Stars team. Who was in charge? An NFF world class coach named Berti Vogts. Patience is one virtue that we lack in our clime. Refresh your mind that after the Super Eagles lost to Senegal in the 2002 Nations Cup, a generation of our players was compulsorily retired from the National team.
While Senegal went ahead to beat France and moved up to the quarter finals, Coach Onigbinde was given the herculean task of recruiting fresh and inexperienced team to the World Cup in Japan/Korea. We want to win all the time. In Nigeria everybody is a coach and the coach must listen to every one of them. Clemens Westerhof remains the best coach Nigeria has had in the past three decades.
The measurement of that success is based on the fact that he won the country a Nations Cup and took us to the World Cup for the first time ever. After that we had Bonfrere Jo, Thijs Libregts Bora Mulitinovich, Berti Vogts and Lars Lagerbach.
These men were hired by the NFF and in decent societies where men are held accountable, some people would have their butts grassed and cooling off in jail. Did they help our course? No. So when these same set of people are calling for foreign assistants, I am left to wonder if it is a season of madness in Nigeria? The same Coach Keshi that “needs” help is the same person who has consistently produced results.
He qualified Togo for the World Cup for the first time ever. Before that, he assisted Shuaibu Amodu to qualify Nigeria for the World Cup in 2002 only to be denied the opportunity of going to the World Cup on both occasions. These feats do not look to me as mere flukes, just as some people will say it is luck. On his second coming to Nigeria, he qualified Nigeria with relatively unknown players for the World Cup and won the Nations Cup under three years that he was appointed. We seem to have short memories.
Not long ago a Nigerian coach hired by the same NFF told a bewildered nation that our local league is incapable of producing quality players for the national team. Instead of appreciating the stupendous job done by Keshi, some of them are shamelessly calling for assistants to ”help’’ him. I am confused on who needs assistants. Is it Keshi or the noisy bunch in Abuja? In the first place, I am not one of those to be carried away by their language of deception.
After all, it is not their antecedents that qualified them in the first place to be at the helm of Nigeria soccer, because of system that deals in patronage. Look at the line up, they are made up of people who got there courtesy of a system that tosses up people not based on competence but rewarded for loyalty. The perfect storm started with the sack of Sylvanus Okpalla.
The claim then was paucity of funds. That did not work. They feared the reaction of Nigerians who justifiably were proud of the work of Keshi. They moved on to set the national captain against the coach. That again failed. Instead of putting their intelligence to good use, they get busy and spin webs of lies. Now that Joseph Yobo has been invited back to the team, I expect some of them to cover their heads in shame. Not in Nigeria!
