@kaybaba99
I was guest-analyst on Sports Planet, a premium radio programme on Beat FM 99.9 (and a host of other radio stations across the country) the morning after Nigeria’s Golden Eaglets defeated their Malian counter-parts 2-0 to win a record-extending 5th FIFA U-17 World Cup. I was on the programme to do a review of the victory and proffer the way forward as to how we can maximise the advantages offered us by our dominance of world football at that level.
The programme’s presenter, the sleek Yemi ‘Donchichi’ Ogunseeyin took me to task and I’ve decided to bring the conversation here so that we can all talk about what needs to be done going forward.
Let me open by saying I vehemently disagree with those who have tried to downplay the achievement of the Golden Eaglets on the grounds that we have not been able to replicate our dominance at that level at a much higher level like the senior World Cup. These naysayers point to the players who they claim are already over-aged whilst playing at the cadet level such that by the time they ought to be playing at a much higher level, they’re already burnt out.
This thinking is fallacious for the simple reason that failure to advance in a football career is not to be explained away as solely age-caused.
As at the time of writing this, there’s no fool-proof method of ascertaining a player’s true age other than as indicated in his international passport. The MRI cannot categorically determine when a player is born or his age so FIFA depends on the goodwill and integrity of its member- associations to present players who are within approved age-limits for age-grade competitions.
Why I contend with people who hold the view that if a player fails at a senior level after showing so much promise at a junior level then he must have cheated on his age declaration is that I believe each player develops and blossoms at his own pace and the inability to go beyond certain levels could be due to a whole number of reasons not related to age.
image: https://isoccerng.com/files/large/781d7c9c65b7515
Take for instance Marcel Witeczek of the former West Germany. He won the Golden Shoe (as best player) at the maiden U-16 World Championship in China 85 but after helping his country to the final of the U-20 World Youth Championship in 1987 (which they lost to the former Yugoslavia), he never played for West Germany again. If he had been Nigerian or African, he would have been accused of having cheated on his age.
Same thing happened to Brazil’s William who was topscorer with five goals in China ’85 and scored twice at the WYC in Chile ’87 before going into oblivion. James Will was the first goalkeeper to win the best player award at the U-17 World Cup but he never made it past more than three solitary caps for his country’s U-21 team before he left football to go and join the police. Did he also cheat on his age?
I can seat here and count a reasonably long number of people who shone at the junior level but failed to make the step up to the next rung on the ladder. Cesc Fabregas won both the Golden Ball and Shoe at the U-17 World Cup in 2003 but the captain of that Spanish side was Jose Manuel Jurado who was already a child prodigy with the Real Madrid B team at the time. While Fabregas went on to win many laurels including the World Cup as well as the Euro championships with Spain, Jurado is today playing with Watford after failing to make the grade at Atletico Madrid, Maloorca, Schalke 04 and Spartak Moscow. I have not heard anybody ascribe his failure to age-cheating.
To be sure, the problem of age-cheating is rampant especially among African teams but rationalizing the ability of African teams to succeed at higher levels is not only faulty but also baseless without facts. There are a lot of reasons to be adduced for this, especially in Nigeria, and I intend to explore those reasons in a later article.
For now, if we all agree that age-cheating is NOT the ONLY reason why we have not impressed at the senior level, let us return to my analysis on Sports Planet. I have reproduced here the transcript of my contribution on the programme.
While I hope you agree with some of my submissions, I pray you find grounds to disagree with me so that we can all help to push the frontiers of discussions in trying to take our football to where it ought to be….
QUE: Congratulations to the Golden Eaglets and all Nigerians including you, Kayode and thank you for joining us on Sports Planet. In all honesty, did you see this coming, I mean the Golden Eaglets winning the Under-17 World Cup in Chile even before the tournament started?
KAY: I’m not going to claim any gift of clairvoyance that I could foresee the future but given what I knew about the team, having the bulk of the technical crew from the 2013 set still intact, I think it was just fair to expect the team to go very far although nobody thought they were going to go all the way to win the trophy, playing some exquisite football along the way. Much had been made of the fact that they didn’t do too well at the African Youth Championship, where they came fourth, but I reminded those who made that claim that the 2013 set also didn’t win the AYC. They were beaten 1-0 in the final by Cote d’Ivoire and, in fact, the only team to win the AYC before going on to become world champions were the 2007 set under the late coach Yemi Tella. So, I argued, not winning the AYC should not be used as a yardstick to hazard a guess as to how far a team will perform.
QUE: What exactly do you think the Coach, Emmanuel Amuneke did right to win this tournament? I mean do you think the same tactics and technique should be used by the Super Eagles coach?
KAY: Absolutely no, I don’t think we should go down that route. I say no with all sense of responsibility. We are talking about kids, impressionable kids, who often times had to be taught the basic rudiments of the game and you want to compare how they’re handled with the Super Eagles where you have players who are almost at the peak of their careers. There’s more tactical than technical work done at the senior level but at the youth teams a coach will still need to take the players through the basics. So it would be faulty, illogical reasoning to attempt to employ whatever system worked at that level at the senior level. It’s a recipe for disaster, I can assure you.
To answer the first part of your question, what worked for coach Amuneke was the fact that he had a supportive backroom staff, I’m close to some of the guys on the technical crew so I can say with certainty that they were all pulling in the same direction, he had the backing of the Nigerian Football Federation and, most importantly, he had a good head on his shoulder. He knows his onions; he’s eminently qualified as a coach and was an accomplished player in his day. He knew what he was doing, he knew what he wanted to do and he knew how he was going to do it to get the desired results and that paid off eventually.
QUE: Now that these boys have come out successful, it’s a well known fact that they will be courted by various European clubs. What should the NFF do to make sure that these young boys are not led astray, thereby derailing their football careers?
KAY: Given what football is, this is their career, this is their lives so we have to be careful how we handle them at this stage so that they can go on to achieve their utmost potentials. There’s little the NFF do in trying to stop them from pursuing a career, whether wrongly or rightly, because we’d seen several instances in the past where players were practically held captive and smuggled out of the country to various obscure leagues in Europe. The story is still told of how a Ghanaian U-17 star was helped to get to Europe using another country’s passport. The NFF cannot stop them from pursuing the proverbial Golden Fleece. They can only control the process, and what do I mean by this?
The NFF can be pro-active by doing something very radical. They can approach some European clubs that are notable for youth development like Ajax Amsterdam, West Ham, Southampton, Crystal Palace, Oslo Lynn in Norway etc and enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with these clubs to take on the players and help them to grow in a structured environment while pursuing their career as well as developing into responsible adults. The NFF will undertake to pay the players stipends which should not be less than what their contemporaries in these clubs make. At the end of four years, they would have developed fully and ready for the demanding lives of professional footballers and the NFF will recoup their investments by taking a fair share of their transfer fees while we grow a steady pool of highly-trained players who are ready for national service.
QUE: Kay, I’d like to box you into a corner right now. What should these young boys get as just rewards for their efforts? Or maybe I should put it this way, what would you give them if you were in a position to reward them?
KAY: Wow, that’s a tough one. I’ve heard a lot of commentaries from people who argue that because the players are still under the age of 17 they should not be given monetary reward but I beg to disagree. Most, if not all, of these players come from less-privileged backgrounds and are already bread-winners of their families who depend on the little they are able to bring in from football to survive so denying them monetary reward on account of their ages will be callous and counter-productive. I hear the first-choice goalkeeper Udo Akpan’s mum is a petty trader. Imagine what a N500,000 cash injection into her petty trade would do and will it be just to deny her the ‘labour’ of her son on account of his age? I don’t think so. I will only advocate that whatever will be given to the players should not strictly be cash-based. Cash, scholarships for those who want to study further as well as stocks in blue-chip companies and bonds which have a maturity of not less than 10 to 15 years.
However, we also have to be careful in what we promise these players because if promises are made and not kept, it could discourage players from giving their best to the national cause. Is it not a shame that the promises made to the team that won the maiden edition 30 years ago in China are yet to be fully redeemed? And, let me shock you, part of the promises made to the Flying Eagles team to Saudi ’89 was the promise of 10,000 shares of a multi-national oil company’s stock but as we speak, 26 years after, nobody can account for what happened to those shares. I’m close to several members of the Saudi ’89 squad and each one of them said they don’t know who to even approach for help and, truth be told, I know many of them who could do with such largesse at this time. So, to answer your question, I will just advocate that the government pledge what can be redeemed under one month, at the most, so that these national heroes will not continue to wait forever.
QUE: Do you think Emmanuel Amuneke should be retained as the Golden Eaglets coach or should he be promoted to our U-20 national team?
KAY: I absolutely kick against his being promoted with the team because from what we had seen in the past, that has not necessarily translated into success for Nigeria. The argument that the coach will know the players better and help the process of bonding does not hold water. We saw John Obuh and the Flying Eagles of 2011 after he had coached the same boys at U-17 in 2009. We also saw Manu Garba with the class of 2015 after he led the boys to success two years ago. In either case, and in several others, it is obvious that promoting the coach with the team does not guarantee success. Albert Stuivenberg was manager of the Netherlands U-17 for seven years and the guy who took France to the WYC in 2009 had been there for quite a while. If a coach has demonstrated competence at one level, I suggest we allow him/her to continue at that level in the hope that it is their forte. Taking them off, in the name of promotion, could be counter-productive.
If you remember, Fanny Amun led the Eaglets to win the title in 1993 and then he was promoted to the Flying Eagles where he couldn’t even win the African Youth Championship despite the competition being hosted in Nigeria in 1995. Two years later, he led the Eaglets to win the Meridien Cup in Portugal at the expense of some of Europe’s best teams. This, more than anything else, should put to rest the argument about the merit and demerit of this so-called ‘promotion’.
QUE: What in your opinion has been Nigeria’s key to success in the U-17 category?
I think the U-17 World Cup was created with Nigeria in mind given the manner we have dominated. We have made nine appearances in the final in 16 editions and I will put it down to the drive and hunger to make a career out of football which pushes our players at that level. Most of the established players we have today have come through one age-grade competition or the other. However, like Yaya Toure recently said, that hunger and fire in their belly dies as soon as they get some form of recognition. Players who should put their heads down begin to have the false notion that they have arrived and football begins to take second or even third place in their to-do list.
Former Nigerian international Olumide Harris told me of an encounter he had in Belgium with one of our former junior players who had all the potentials to make it big in football but who got easily distracted by the fast life of women, wine and possibly weed. The player, a former Golden Eaglets star never made it beyond that level because of his waywardness and indiscipline and is today languishing in one obscure league abroad.
So, in my opinion, we have been very successful not because of any diligence in planning or any deliberate sports policy but because of the desire and determination of the players and coaches to make a name for themselves. Maybe if we now add an articulated, well-defined and properly implemented policy to our sports, we can start talking about getting our players to perform at higher levels than they currently do.
QUE: Finally, who was the best player, in your opinion?
KAY: Straight up I will tell you it was Kelechi Nwakali and I will back my assertion with a small story. During the team’s preparation, shortly before the African qualifiers, I was in thier camp and I saw the young Nwakali in action and such was the effect he had on me that I had to call the attention of one of his coaches. He told me how proud they were of the youngster and planned to build the team around him. Glad to say everything the coach told me about Nwakali came to pass and I can say he has redefined his role on the football pitch. I’m so glad he’s a Nigerian and I’m absolutely certain he has a huge future ahead of him in the game.
That, dear friends, was my contribution. Congratulations to all Nigerians on the Golden Eaglets victory.
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