Tag: keshi

Nigeria’s football house seems to thrive on chaos, intrigues and confusion; all the ingredients that make for retardation and under-development. Mind you we do not refer to the edifice, the Glass House, the Abuja secretariat of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF). We talk about the administrators and managers tending Nigeria’s beautiful game of football. It is as if something odious is always in the brew in the Glass House and every now and then it wafts into the atmosphere sending Nigerians scampering and holding their noses. We are beginning to get used to the fact that scandals and misbehaviour come to them naturally to the point that when there is no caper, they create one.

We are of course belly-aching over the recent shenanigan in the football house between the coach of Nigeria’s senior football team, Stephen Keshi and members of the Technical Committee of the NFF, let’s call them NFFTC. The report which had been in the grape vine since last year after Keshi led the Super Eagles to win the Africa Nations Cup, AFCON, the premier continental football trophy, blew to the open recently. As the story goes, a plan was afoot by the NFFTC to employ a foreign technical assistant ostensibly to help Keshi prosecute the World Cup tournament in June.

In fact, there was an indication of this move when shortly after the Nation’s Cup success last year, the NFF had moved in such a brazen manner to fire most of Keshi’s backroom staff, including his technical assistant and video analyst, without as much as a discussion with him. The excuse then was paucity of funds. But football watchers think it was a ploy to cut Keshi to size as he is deemed to have become uncontrollable since he led the team to clinch the AFCON trophy. Recall his resignation brouhaha in South Africa shortly after AFCON and the bonus battle just before the Confederation Cup tournament last year.

All these gave fillip to the persistent murmurings that Keshi must either be removed or reduced. The cage-Keshi-monster may have broken from its leash again after the recently concluded CHAN tournament. Some members of the NFFTC notably, Paul Bassey and Victor Ikpeba had told journalists that a foreign technical assistant (TA) was to be employed shortly for the Super Eagles. When a spontaneous uproar from Nigerians greeted the pronouncement and Keshi insisted that he would not be subordinated to any other coach, they quickly made clarifications that the TA would not sit on the bench with Keshi but would largely do the work of a video analyst. NFFTC insist that only a foreign TA would help Nigeria make an impact during the world Cup in Brazil.

But the more they explain, the louder soccer-crazy Nigerians shout them down with a let-Keshi-be slogan. In fact Keshi has become the nemesis of those who used to do jiu-jitsu with football in Nigeria; he is the kind of meat Yourba call ishan, they can chew him all they want but they cannot swallow him. To moot a foreign TA just about four months to the football mundial is to suggest that Keshi is not technically sound enough to play at the world stage. In their diminished self-esteem, they will pay the white skin tenfold higher than Keshi, this will instantly breed disaffection and cause crisis in the team Keshi has been building in the past two years.

Obviously, many are not happy with the stability and progress the Keshi era has brought to the national team and our football sub-sector. But we say let those who feed through crises starve.