By Sedara Oluwadara
Former Flying Eagles Coach and U17 World Cup winner Manu Garba offers his opinion on why Nigeria clubs fail in CAF competitions.
When a team failed to win laurels, we as coaches normally takes the blame because we have the final say when it comes to team selection but of course it doesn’t mean Nigerian Coaches aren’t good enough to contest winning trophies with other coaches across the globe.
Before I dwell on other factors that affect performance, let me recall in 2015 during the Afcon U20 Senegal 2015, Ghana had Avram Grant supporting the Ghana-U20 technical crew but we defeated Ghana-U20 2-0 and went ahead to win the AFCON U20 Senegal 2015 beating Senegal 1-0 in the final and till date the sports Ministry and Federal Government didn’t host that team and imagine if it were the Super Eagles team.
For the failure of our teams at continental level, I believe we didn’t prepare adequately both technically, physically, tactically, psychologically and mentally because of the short period of finishing our league and of course getting the best players to win continental glory.
The level of players have gone down compared to the 80s and 90s and you can hardly see a player who decide winning a match with individual brilliance in our Professional League and most importantly we have to prepare adequately playing both local and international friendly matches before our continental matches.
I believe if most of our players are good in one against one situations both in attack and defense and well motivated and prepared, our teams would have gone far.
May I suggest that the technical committee of the NFF, Coaches of the continental teams, other stakeholders especially those who criticize teams performance on social media have an analysis of all the matches played and we work on the negatives
