The urge to write about the Golden Eaglets squad at the 2013 U-17 World Cup in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is strong.
The only snag is that one doesn’t want to provide the ammunition for our opponents.
In any case, one doesn’t celebrate every time Nigeria is involved in age-grade competitions.
The argument that Nigeria is not the only culprit is bunkum. We shouldn’t join the bandwagon of cheats because we are richly endowed with talents at the grassroots to rule the world, if only our coaches are sincere and ready to work.
Our coaches are guilty of recruiting men as boys for our age-grade teams. They collude with the kids’ parents and their grassroots counterparts to falsify the players’ bio-data.
The best thing that the NFF did was to ensure that MRI tests were done. But the coaches ought to have done their home work before inviting the boys. The argument that we put the coaches under pressure to win is not correct. We need to do the right things so that we can measure our true strength in this cadre, beyond winning laurels.
It is so sad to read that Kayode Olarenwaju has close to 100 signatures at a time when he is being perceived as a 19-year old. He made his debut as an Eaglet in 2009 and played for the U-20 side twice in 2011 and 2013, yet he wasn’t a student when he came to limelight in 2009.
Olarenwaju’s tales have arisen from his controversial transfer from his Ivoiren club, meaning that those who lost out of the debious contract are spilling the beans. The dangerous implication of the Olarenwaju saga is that Nigeria could lose her silver medal, in the event that FIFA investigates and finds us culpable of falsifying his age.
We have no business having issues with the authenticity of our players’ ages, if the 774 Local Government Areas (LGAs) work in concert with the 36 states and Abuja as well as the Ministry of Education to reinvent the schools’ sports programmes of yore – Principals Cup, LG Chairman’s Cup and other inter-zonal, intra and inter-LGs competitions.
These schools competitions provided the framework to compile the students’ data alongside producing the talents that went on to represent Nigeria. The age bracket between ages one and 16 tells anyone that such people should be in the secondary schools. There may be a few exceptions, but one in which none of the 22 players is a secondary school pupil raises quite a number of issues. When this happens, then cheating has occurred, irrespective of the argument that each one of them passed the MRI test.
School sports competitions of yore were documented, even though it was said then that most footballers repeated their class or changed schools every year. Still, they played as students, with the few who did as mercenaries disqualified and such schools banned from the competitions.
I cringed when it was reported that the current team’s top goal scorer with four goals in the first game is 14 years old. It occurred to me that he must be a secondary school student. I have read all newspapers to see if any report would be published where his mates celebrated his feat. Again, I expected that he took permission from his school principal to go for the competition in UAE. If that was the case, I thought that I would have seen pictures where the school’s pupils stopped classes to watch from the big screen one of their own playing for Nigeria. The flipside could be that he isn’t a student. If yes, he must have gone to primary school. So, which primary school? Who are his mates? Where are his parents? How about his brothers and sisters? What of his relations? Why are they not celebrating?
I’m still waiting to see pictures of students in the schools where these Eaglets play watching them or comments from them about their school mates’ exploits. It would be very sad if they are not students. I don’t need a seer to tell me that these Eaglets won’t appreciate any scholarship package if they lift the trophy in the UAE. They would prefer cash because they know that it won’t add value to their lives, except for about one of two of them with good grades.
Besides football, we have witnessed the various musical talent hunts, such as Idol Nigerian, Project Fame, etc, where some of the talents’ schools are projected celebrating the feat that they produced the talents. Oftentimes, parents and siblings of these talents are given media exposure, if anything, to highlight their backgrounds. Why not with the Eaglets?
So, it would not have been out of place if the secondary schools that produced our Eaglets are once in a while given the credits for harnessing such prodigious talents to feed our football.
We were champions in 2007 and runners-up in the 2009 edition held in Abuja, yet only two players (Ogueyi Onazi and Kenneth Emeruo) have made it to the Super Eagles. In contrast, at the 2007 edition where Nigeria beat Spain in the finals to lift the trophy, Dele Ajiboye (tagged by the European commentators as Aji boy) was voted the best goalkeeper ahead of De Gea. Today, De Gea is the number one choice at Manchester United of England. Nobody knows where Ajiboye plays today. The price for cheating is awesome.
My take on all this bothers on two contentions, one of which is that we are driven by must-win mentality by our football federation; the other is the perceived job insecurity of the handlers of our age-grade teams which propels them to draft over-aged boys to ensure victory at all costs and, in so doing, keep their jobs.
This brings me also to comments and reactions from some of my colleagues who seem to have literally gone over the moon following the outcome of the Eaglets’ hammering of the youthful Mexicans. I watched with amazement how praises are being heaped on the various academies that purportedly produced the current crop of Eaglets.
Have we bothered to ask at what age they enlisted into these academies? For all we care, most or all of the boys may have joined the academies at age 20, 22 or even 25. Is it impossible to doctor one’s age at the point of enlistment? Don’t highly placed people doctor their certificates and ages to keep their exalted positions? These academies have people who specialize in securing different Nigerian passports to the players with different ages, depending on what the foreign scouts ask for?
But the biggest victim of this age-wangling trend is our senior national team which has never witnessed a seamless transition from the junior to senior level of our national team.
We become the laughing stock every time we are unable to graduate our age-grade stars into the Super Eagles akin to what we see in other climes.
The lesson from the Eaglets’ 3-3 draw against Sweden is that our coaches’s technical savvy isn’t in sync with global practices. We played the same style that earned us the 6-1 whiplash of the Mexicans. The Swedish coach watched the tape of the Mexican game and came up with counter strategies to neutralise the Eaglets.
The Eaglets’ fight-back arose from the typical Nigerian spartan spirit, not necessarily from tactics dished out by the coaches, who watched in awe as the Swedes ran rings around our boys in the first half.
Our coaches need refresher courses to upgrade their skills. Eaglets’ coaching crew comprises ex- youth internationals, who still need to be taught the rudiments of the dynamic game.
The Eaglets look like champions – only if the coaches can read our matches properly and make informed changes that will improve the team’s performance. Good luck Eaglets; the game is on. Any Eaglets side without school pupils is a fraud. Eaglets have no business being identified through football academies. I rest my case.
