By Ebi Egbe
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Finidi George is not the problem of Nigerian failure to win our two World Cup qualifiers game.
Our problem is not understanding the nature of African football and the scientific part of todays is the ball behavior in an high profile game like the World Cup qualifiers and the Nations cup qualifiers.
Nigeria is a country that is blessed with talented refined and unrefined raw football players.
The unrefined raw talented players in the NPFL are very hungry for success and they would see a super eagles call up as an opportunity to uplift their playing carrier and also the adaptation level of this home based players to 100% natural grass pitches with slow ball movement and 3G synthetic grass pitches with rubber granules infill that gives negative ball movements are very high because they ply thier trade on such pitches week in week out in the NPFL, they will adapt well to this African pitches than our star studded elite invites for the Super Eagles.
The refined ready made Nigerian players that all our super Eagles coaches always rely on for our elite African World Cup and nations cup qualifiers games unfortunately have been trained to ply their trade only on zero undulated elite pitches that aid speed football with good energy restitution and Nigeria does not have such pitches, not even one, the only closest pitch with similar ball behavior to an elite pitch is the Remor stars hybrid Synthetic pitch in Ikenne Ogun State. That is the only pitch in Nigeria that is currently being maintained as when due for professional football with all her high-powered piston controlled pop-up Sprikler systems working.
If Nigeria can invest on just one hydroponic hybrid pitch in either the Abuja National stadium or the Lagos National Stadium in surulere, the fortune of our home games will change dramatically.
I repeat, Finidi George is not the problem of our last two home games, I said this before the two home games and am still saying it today again, even if the NFF bring the best coach in the world for the Super Eagles our result will not be any different from Finidi and his predecessors if the coach is 100% reliant on our refined elite players because of the standard of our pitches in Nigeria and other countries where we need to play away games.
Nigeria can tactically survive these menace that has seen the back sliding of our national team in our games by investing on just one hydroponic hybrid system in National Stadium Surulere Lagos.
Yes, I chose national stadium Surulere lagos because that has always been the original home of the Nigerian Super Eagles, if we can go back to our old national anthem why can’t we move the super Eagles back to her ancestral home lagos National stadium and transform that stadium into a proper football stadium.
The NFF getting a foreign technical adviser honestly is not a good way forward for Nigerian Football, these so called technical adviser will be a complete wast of resources because the root cause of the super Eagles elite team performance have not been addressed.
We must not allow our emotions becloud our reasoning, every one is saying, sack Finidi because he picked up a draw and lost a game to republic of Benin forgetting we had similar defeat by Cape Verde some few years back with a foreign technical adviser and he wasn’t disgracefully demoted.
If Nigeria is not ready to give our elite super eagles players an elite playing surface like what they train and play at club side football week in week out in their various club side, we should start thinking of how our super eagles coaches can be fusing our best legs in the NPFL with our elite players from Europe.
*Ebi Egbe is the CEO of Monimichelle Sports Facilities Construction Company Limited and writes from Yenagoa, Bayelsa State
