Final whistle for 2010
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- Category: Sports
- Written by ODEGBAMI ON SATURDAY
- Hits: 801
The outgoing year is both an end and a beginning. It is the end of a decade that Nigeria achieved very little in sports, and at the same time the beginning of a new decade full of possibilities and hope! When we look back at the past year we want to decide quickly whether it has been glorious or disappointing.
My choice is that even when the things one aspires to have not materialised it is not because God was not listening to his people’s prayer but because he is preparing something better! So, the year 2010, even as stormy as it was, has been glorious.My prayer this new year is that God shall take all the broken pieces of Nigerian sports and turn them into a wonderful mosaic.
We need a heart of flesh in our football and not a heart of stone.
I wish all Nigerians a Happy and very prosperous new decade.
Will Siasia succeed?
I am starting my excursion into 2011 by writing about my friend, Samson Siasia who was recently appointed coach of the Super Eagles. No one has campaigned as vigorously as I have to ensure that Samson Siasia is recognised and given the opportunity to handle the national team of Nigeria. I introduced the idea, closely followed by Onochie Anibeze of the Vanguard, some 17 years ago when Samson himself was still actively involved in football as a player and had not thought of what to do with his life beyond that of being an idolised football player. I saw in him the raw ingredients of a potentially good coach even as a player. He was streetwise, smart, charming, and a no-nonsense personality amongst his peers! I believed that his generation of players, led by the Big Boss Stephen Keshi, would start what would mark the end of foreign coaches in Nigerian football. His generation was made up of players that had everything to prepare them to become coaches that can handle any team in the world. As players they were ‘baptised’ and well-cultured in the Nigerian domestic style of play before heading abroad to a higher level to be honed into proper professionals. They played under more knowledgeable European coaches for years and did well to transfer their experience to consolidate the Nigerian national team. They represented Nigeria well for several years through several memorable international football battles, and achieved more than any other national team before and since then by winning the African Cup of Nations back-to-back with qualifying for the FIFA World Cup for the first time in Nigeria’s history. In that same year, 1994, they rose in ranking to an enviable fifth in the world. All that the players of that generation needed after their achievements was to choose what area of football they wanted to go into at the end of their careers and their success would be almost be guaranteed. I considered them that grounded in football. Those that chose to become coaches would only require the training to change their mentality from that of a player to that of a coach, and the best of them would be defined by the strength of their individual abilities - character, intelligence and grounding in understanding the fundamentals of organised football patterns.
I predicted that the personality of Samson would fit the bill of a Nigerian that could deal with the intricacies required to successfully handle the national team, and started to promote the idea. I am not surprised, therefore, that only 6 years into his career in Nigerian football Samson has done so well for himself in coaching and has crowned his meteoric rise with the chance of a lifetime to coach the senior national team of Nigeria. In 6 years he earned the right by rising through the ranks, from the under-20 national team, to the under-23 Olympic team and, now, to the Super Eagles. He has now arrived at the pinnacle of coaching in Nigeria.
Samson Siasia now has a responsibility to himself to make the best use of this God-given opportunity. In order words, he should not blow the chance! One guarantee he will get from me, and, I believe, from many other Nigerians that have also vigorously supported him so far, is that we shall not shy away from giving him all the support we can muster, in our little way, to ensure that he succeeds. Our support shall not be by interfering in his work, but, at his convenience and acceptance, occasionally, dispassionately discussing issues of mutual interest with him, after all, at the end of the day, the responsibility for the team’s fortunes will be entirely his.
Having said all that, as a public commentator on public issues in sports, I have been watching developments around Siasia very closely since his appointment. Let me be very categorical and state that even as I am his greatest admirer and supporter I am not a supporter of the process that offered him the job. I still see the NFA board and its technical Committee as illegal constructions without the mandate to do what they are doing. I will not be part of or side with any decision they take until the matter of their legality is completed and settled by the necessary authorities. In the meantime however, Samson Siasia has the job and must do what he has to do to build a solid new senior national team for Nigeria. Finally, on the slightly negative side, I must also express my dissatisfaction that the process of selecting him had to pitch him against one of his colleagues and friends in an unhealthy competition that could only have created the psychological divisiveness that it must now have created between Stephen Keshi and Samson Siasia, no matter what they both say to the contrary and how much people try to make light of the situation. Siasia, on his own merit, and because he is the people’s choice, should simply have been interviewed and, if found satisfactory, offered the job. Serious football countries do not conduct interviews for a multiple number of seasoned coaches by making them face a panel of people with even less knowledge than themselves about the job they want them to do. In football, records speak louder than words!
The Challenges ahead for Siasia
Success for Samson Siasia would not be measured any differently from what has now become standard practice every time a new coach is hired to handle the national team. The Super Eagles must play well and qualify for every international championship they register for. That means that Samson must raise a new team (the old team will take him nowhere), overcome all the challenges (and there are a myriad particularly in the domestic scene), deal with all opposition, and win a lot of matches on a regular basis. That means the Eagles must qualify for the next Africa Cup of Nations and the World Cup. As soon as these are done, higher targets will be automatically set such as winning the Africa Cup of Nations and getting to the semi-finals of the World Cup. I guess after the 2010 World Cup experience, the bar of expectation has been raised permanently for the Super Eagles. Nigerians will no longer be satisfied with anything less than the semi-finals of the World Cup! The question now is this: Is this a tall order for the 2014 edition? Will this be asking too much of Samson considering the amount of damage done to the national team in the past few years? Will this be a realisable target considering the poor state of Nigerian football now?
I am peering into my crystal ball and looking at the prospects of the Super Eagles under Siasia. What does Samson Siasia have to do now, in the medium term and in the long term in order to succeed?
The first step is to create the impression in the minds of Nigerians that his team will be different from the team of the immediate past. He must distance himself from most of the failed players of the past. His team must start to play with some style and star winning matches immediately. That means he must not jump into playing difficult teams. His choice of a small tournament in the USA in the new year is a right step. He must go to the Obama Cup tournament and make an impression. The 10 barren years of the Eagles are enough evidence that he needs to find more and better equipped new players to do the job for him. His under-20 team of 2005 that should have formed the core of the 2010 Super Eagles and, indeed his own team now, has disintegrated! Whereas Lionel Messi has grown and developed to become the world’s best football player, many of Messi’s contemporaries in the Nigerian team have all but ‘faded’ into obscurity! Although most of the players in that team were not exceptional yet Samson Siasia managed to build them into a truly well-oiled formidable running and hard fighting machine. That is the attribute that he must inculcate in whatever team he is building now. Looking for exceptionally gifted players will take a while, particularly since he would be looking at a younger generation of new players in the country. Siasia must appoint a new leader for the team, one that catches his vision and fire, and can drive the rest of the players to ‘hunger’ for success. He must introduce a rigorous programme that will test as many players as possible, fully exploiting all the available FIFA windows and organising many local international matches so that he can look at emerging players and shore up his reservoir of players good enough to be invited to the national team proper. He must avoid all those meaningless and wasteful visitations to players in Europe that have been of little value to the national team in times past.
Samson’s greatest challenge will be time. He has no luxury of time. He must hit the ground running! In 2006, after Siasia had taken Nigeria to the finals of the Olympics football championship, I would have wagered that Nigeria would win the 2010 World Cup. Just as we saw the Black Stars of Ghana perform in 2010, so would the Super Eagles have played. They would have run every opposing team to the ground in South Africa. With a little bit of luck, even the worst Eagles in our recent history almost survived the first round against Argentina. Against Greece they naively and carelessly threw away the match. And against South Korea they were just hapless. With a fairly decent team made up of hardworking players like Siasia’s Olympic team Nigeria could very easily have qualified beyond the first round, and once that happens team work rather than individual artistry would have taken over and anything could have happened including the possibility of getting to the semi-finals. Samson does not have the luxury of time to start building such a team again.
Samson’s next challenge would be his psychology. Has he overcome the shock of his ‘faulty’ steps after the Beijin Olympics? That assignment in Egypt humbled and slightly demystified him. He took coaching for granted and paid a heavy price. Now fate has offered him a second chance. How will he react?
Samson must now engage himself fully in looking for players and building a relatively new team. He must make use of a network of good coaches that would help him with scouting for these players (both local and international). He must assure Nigerians constantly through the initial period of his work that he intends to present the country with a new team and needs a little bit of time to set things right! The team must have a new Captain and the stamp of Samson Siasia written all over it.
Articles
Final whistle for 2010
Category: Sports Written by ODEGBAMI ON SATURDAY Hits: 801
The outgoing year is both an end and a beginning. It is the end of a decade that Nigeria achieved very little in sports, and at the same time the beginning of a new decade full of possibilities and hope! When we look back at the past year we want to decide quickly whether it has been glorious or disappointing.
My choice is that even when the things one aspires to have not materialised it is not because God was not listening to his people’s prayer but because he is preparing something better! So, the year 2010, even as stormy as it was, has been glorious.My prayer this new year is that God shall take all the broken pieces of Nigerian sports and turn them into a wonderful mosaic.
We need a heart of flesh in our football and not a heart of stone.
I wish all Nigerians a Happy and very prosperous new decade.
Will Siasia succeed?
I am starting my excursion into 2011 by writing about my friend, Samson Siasia who was recently appointed coach of the Super Eagles. No one has campaigned as vigorously as I have to ensure that Samson Siasia is recognised and given the opportunity to handle the national team of Nigeria. I introduced the idea, closely followed by Onochie Anibeze of the Vanguard, some 17 years ago when Samson himself was still actively involved in football as a player and had not thought of what to do with his life beyond that of being an idolised football player. I saw in him the raw ingredients of a potentially good coach even as a player. He was streetwise, smart, charming, and a no-nonsense personality amongst his peers! I believed that his generation of players, led by the Big Boss Stephen Keshi, would start what would mark the end of foreign coaches in Nigerian football. His generation was made up of players that had everything to prepare them to become coaches that can handle any team in the world. As players they were ‘baptised’ and well-cultured in the Nigerian domestic style of play before heading abroad to a higher level to be honed into proper professionals. They played under more knowledgeable European coaches for years and did well to transfer their experience to consolidate the Nigerian national team. They represented Nigeria well for several years through several memorable international football battles, and achieved more than any other national team before and since then by winning the African Cup of Nations back-to-back with qualifying for the FIFA World Cup for the first time in Nigeria’s history. In that same year, 1994, they rose in ranking to an enviable fifth in the world. All that the players of that generation needed after their achievements was to choose what area of football they wanted to go into at the end of their careers and their success would be almost be guaranteed. I considered them that grounded in football. Those that chose to become coaches would only require the training to change their mentality from that of a player to that of a coach, and the best of them would be defined by the strength of their individual abilities - character, intelligence and grounding in understanding the fundamentals of organised football patterns.
I predicted that the personality of Samson would fit the bill of a Nigerian that could deal with the intricacies required to successfully handle the national team, and started to promote the idea. I am not surprised, therefore, that only 6 years into his career in Nigerian football Samson has done so well for himself in coaching and has crowned his meteoric rise with the chance of a lifetime to coach the senior national team of Nigeria. In 6 years he earned the right by rising through the ranks, from the under-20 national team, to the under-23 Olympic team and, now, to the Super Eagles. He has now arrived at the pinnacle of coaching in Nigeria.
Samson Siasia now has a responsibility to himself to make the best use of this God-given opportunity. In order words, he should not blow the chance! One guarantee he will get from me, and, I believe, from many other Nigerians that have also vigorously supported him so far, is that we shall not shy away from giving him all the support we can muster, in our little way, to ensure that he succeeds. Our support shall not be by interfering in his work, but, at his convenience and acceptance, occasionally, dispassionately discussing issues of mutual interest with him, after all, at the end of the day, the responsibility for the team’s fortunes will be entirely his.
Having said all that, as a public commentator on public issues in sports, I have been watching developments around Siasia very closely since his appointment. Let me be very categorical and state that even as I am his greatest admirer and supporter I am not a supporter of the process that offered him the job. I still see the NFA board and its technical Committee as illegal constructions without the mandate to do what they are doing. I will not be part of or side with any decision they take until the matter of their legality is completed and settled by the necessary authorities. In the meantime however, Samson Siasia has the job and must do what he has to do to build a solid new senior national team for Nigeria. Finally, on the slightly negative side, I must also express my dissatisfaction that the process of selecting him had to pitch him against one of his colleagues and friends in an unhealthy competition that could only have created the psychological divisiveness that it must now have created between Stephen Keshi and Samson Siasia, no matter what they both say to the contrary and how much people try to make light of the situation. Siasia, on his own merit, and because he is the people’s choice, should simply have been interviewed and, if found satisfactory, offered the job. Serious football countries do not conduct interviews for a multiple number of seasoned coaches by making them face a panel of people with even less knowledge than themselves about the job they want them to do. In football, records speak louder than words!
The Challenges ahead for Siasia
Success for Samson Siasia would not be measured any differently from what has now become standard practice every time a new coach is hired to handle the national team. The Super Eagles must play well and qualify for every international championship they register for. That means that Samson must raise a new team (the old team will take him nowhere), overcome all the challenges (and there are a myriad particularly in the domestic scene), deal with all opposition, and win a lot of matches on a regular basis. That means the Eagles must qualify for the next Africa Cup of Nations and the World Cup. As soon as these are done, higher targets will be automatically set such as winning the Africa Cup of Nations and getting to the semi-finals of the World Cup. I guess after the 2010 World Cup experience, the bar of expectation has been raised permanently for the Super Eagles. Nigerians will no longer be satisfied with anything less than the semi-finals of the World Cup! The question now is this: Is this a tall order for the 2014 edition? Will this be asking too much of Samson considering the amount of damage done to the national team in the past few years? Will this be a realisable target considering the poor state of Nigerian football now?
I am peering into my crystal ball and looking at the prospects of the Super Eagles under Siasia. What does Samson Siasia have to do now, in the medium term and in the long term in order to succeed?
The first step is to create the impression in the minds of Nigerians that his team will be different from the team of the immediate past. He must distance himself from most of the failed players of the past. His team must start to play with some style and star winning matches immediately. That means he must not jump into playing difficult teams. His choice of a small tournament in the USA in the new year is a right step. He must go to the Obama Cup tournament and make an impression. The 10 barren years of the Eagles are enough evidence that he needs to find more and better equipped new players to do the job for him. His under-20 team of 2005 that should have formed the core of the 2010 Super Eagles and, indeed his own team now, has disintegrated! Whereas Lionel Messi has grown and developed to become the world’s best football player, many of Messi’s contemporaries in the Nigerian team have all but ‘faded’ into obscurity! Although most of the players in that team were not exceptional yet Samson Siasia managed to build them into a truly well-oiled formidable running and hard fighting machine. That is the attribute that he must inculcate in whatever team he is building now. Looking for exceptionally gifted players will take a while, particularly since he would be looking at a younger generation of new players in the country. Siasia must appoint a new leader for the team, one that catches his vision and fire, and can drive the rest of the players to ‘hunger’ for success. He must introduce a rigorous programme that will test as many players as possible, fully exploiting all the available FIFA windows and organising many local international matches so that he can look at emerging players and shore up his reservoir of players good enough to be invited to the national team proper. He must avoid all those meaningless and wasteful visitations to players in Europe that have been of little value to the national team in times past.
Samson’s greatest challenge will be time. He has no luxury of time. He must hit the ground running! In 2006, after Siasia had taken Nigeria to the finals of the Olympics football championship, I would have wagered that Nigeria would win the 2010 World Cup. Just as we saw the Black Stars of Ghana perform in 2010, so would the Super Eagles have played. They would have run every opposing team to the ground in South Africa. With a little bit of luck, even the worst Eagles in our recent history almost survived the first round against Argentina. Against Greece they naively and carelessly threw away the match. And against South Korea they were just hapless. With a fairly decent team made up of hardworking players like Siasia’s Olympic team Nigeria could very easily have qualified beyond the first round, and once that happens team work rather than individual artistry would have taken over and anything could have happened including the possibility of getting to the semi-finals. Samson does not have the luxury of time to start building such a team again.
Samson’s next challenge would be his psychology. Has he overcome the shock of his ‘faulty’ steps after the Beijin Olympics? That assignment in Egypt humbled and slightly demystified him. He took coaching for granted and paid a heavy price. Now fate has offered him a second chance. How will he react?
Samson must now engage himself fully in looking for players and building a relatively new team. He must make use of a network of good coaches that would help him with scouting for these players (both local and international). He must assure Nigerians constantly through the initial period of his work that he intends to present the country with a new team and needs a little bit of time to set things right! The team must have a new Captain and the stamp of Samson Siasia written all over it.