MOSES KPAKOR, with five gold medal, one silver and two bronze medals, is aruably one of the most decorated players in FA Cup history. He excelled in his midfield role that Super Eagles manager Clemens Westerhof nicknamed him the ‘policeman’…….
Kpakor was a player’s player and a coach’s delight. He was exceptional in that he carried out his coaches’ instructions to the letter. No wonder, former Super Eagles manager Clemens Westerhof nicknamed him the team’s “policeman” for his ability to mark out any opposing player that crossed his midfield territory.
A native Tiv by birth, the young Moses was born at the NKST Mkar hospital in Gboko, Benue State on 6 January 1965 and spent his formative years in the town where he was to later make a name for himself in future but, in the meantime, destiny had a detour for him away from his beloved Gboko although it was only for a little time.
He stayed in Gboko for five years before his parents moved back to their hometown, ‘Adikpo London where their young son attended NKST Primary School Adikpo from 1970-73 and then LGEA Primary School, Ushongo (1974), LGEA Primary school, Katsina-Ala (1975) and finally, LGEA Primary School Kuhe-Nanev in 1976. For high school, he went to Saint Andrew’s Secondary School, Adikpo from 1976-79 before gaining admission to Government Teachers College Makurdi from1980-82
Moses’ romance with football started from a very early age, as early as three years old according to an account by his mother. Like other kids growing up in Africa, he started on the streets of his hometown, Adikpo London, regarded as the ‘Brazil’ of Benue State for its rich repository of football talents.
He suffered his first heartache in football when his LGEA Primary school, Ushongo lost to NKST Primary school, Adikpo in the final match of the All-primary School Football Cup in Tivland in 1974. He might have been on the losing side but not a few people took notice of the budding talent in the young but stocky boy.
By the time he got to the Government Teachers College in 1980, he was already an household name in Benue state and his fame increased exponentially as he won the Benue State Principals Cup twice (1981 and 1982) in three successive finals (1980, 1981 and 1982) with GTC.
By the time Kpakor left secondary school in 1979, his was a talent waiting to be plucked and it was the star-studded Greater Tomorrow Academy of Adikpo which snapped him up in 1979. His teammates were the likes of late Amir Angwe, late Terfa Akpurugh, Peter Edibi who is now Chaiman of Referees Association in Cross River State and many others. His stay with greater Tomorrow was short but eventful.
In 1981, after leaving the team, he was picked to represent Kwande Local Government Area during the 3rd Benue State Festival tagged ‘LOBI 81’ in both the senior as well as the junior teams. He captained the junior team and, at the end of the Festival, he helped the senior team to the gold medal but won silver in the junior category.
He was subsequently named the Benue State Footballer of the Year and was included in the junior team that represented Benue at the 5th National Sports Festival in Benin City in 1981. In Benin, he scored four goals in a single match against Kaduna State and this, among other things, earned him a call-up to the Flying Eagles team under Coach Christopher Udemezie.
After the National Festival in 1981, he joined Hawks Football Club of Makurdi (which later transformed into today’s Lobi Stars) at the start of the 1982 season but began the year in camp with the Flying Eagles at the Bembo Games Village in Apata, Ibadan. While in camp, he sought permission and travelled back to Makurdi to write his final (Grade II) exams.
After the exams, the Benue State Sports Council could not raise money for me to go back to the Flying Eagles camp and that was how he lost the chance to play for Nigeria at junior level. Thankfully, his senior brother, the late Terfar hoisted the flag of the Kpakor family at that level.
With the Flying Eagles road closed to him, Moses settled down to club football with Hawks and emerged as the club’s highest goalscorer at the end of the Benue State Super League with 13 goals from 9 matches, a feat which was good enough to merit an invitation to the senior national team, the Green Eagles.
He spent just one season at Hawks and moved to Jos to team up with Electricity FC in 1983. The following season he was back in Gboko with BCC Lions for the next three seasons. In 1987, he joined Abiola Babes in a season’s deal and won the first of his five FA Cup winners medal in six final appearances. After just one season in Abeokuta, he returned to BCC Lions in 1988 and played for the club until he finally called time on his illustrious career in 1998.
Incredibly, although he got his first invitation in 1982, Moses was not to make his competitive debut until 1990. The eight years hiatus, incredible as it was did not bother him one bit as he philosophically waited for his own time to arrive.
He said: “My first invitation was in 1982, the second was in 1984 and the third was in 1989 but my first game for Nigeria came after 8 years of apprenticeship. That was in 1990 against Senegal during the ECOWAS Cup in Bauchi which preceded the 1990 Nations Cup in Algeria.”
One is puzzled about why it took Moses eight years to get a first cap for Nigeria despite his undoubted talent but, in his characteristic candour, Kpakor admitted the guys ahead of him truly deserved their place in the team.
“Of course, they were better players. But my invitations also proved that I was also a good material for the future. I was a striker when I got the first call and you do not expect me to play when we had the likes of Wakilu Oyenuga (head master) for example. Much later I became a midfielder and you had ageless and tireless Muda Lawal , Ademola Adesina, Fatai Amao and others. Let me tell you, it was then not possible to have someone outside Lagos, Benin, Ibadan, Enugu Jos, Portharcourt, Kano and Kaduna to play for Nigeria. These were massive football cities and the coaches had too many options to select from. Especially from the first four i.e (Stationery Stores, Bendel Insurance, IICC Shooting Stars and Enugu Rangers). Put beside these clubs, Hawks or Benue won’t stand a chance. But I waited for my time and, when it came, I grabbed it with both hands.”
The chance in question, to which Moses referred, was the arrival of a certain Dutchman who had just been hired as technical adviser to the Eagles. On failing to qualify Nigeria for the 1990 World Cup in Italy, Clemens Westerhof set about raising a new generation of players for the Super Eagles and such was his admiration for the all-action style of the BCC Lions of Gboko strongman that he was one of the first call-ups.
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His team BCC Lions had just won the 1989 FA Cup, breaking a 35-year old jinx for northern teams since Kano Pillars won in 1953, and such was Kpakor’s influence in the final game against a star-studded Iwuanyanwu Nationale of Owerri that pundits were in agreement that the 25-year old has come of age and ripe for national team duties. The Cup win was also his second in three years following his success with Abiola Babes two years earlier.
He caught the eye of Westerhof who deployed him a variety of positions before finally settling for a holding-midfield role for him, many years before Claude Makelele made the role popular. One of his attributes, for which he gained national and international renown, was the ability to shadow-mark an opponent and nowhere was this skill more amply demonstrated than in a 1992 AFCON qualifier between Nigeria and Ghana in Accra in 1991. He was so effective against Black Stars’ Abedi Pele that the Ghanaian captain reportedly made enquiries about who ‘that Nigerian guy’ was. He, thenceforth, came to be known as the policeman of the Super Eagles. Once he ‘arrests’ you, Westerhof once famously claimed, it was difficult to escape.
1990 was the year that the name Moses Kpakor really reverberated on the African continent. He was a part of the Super Eagles team that won the ECOWAS Cup in Bauchi in January of that year and also made the squad to the AFCON in Algiers in March where he played every single minute, minus the last 11 minutes of the Group A game against Ivory Coast when he came off for Ayo Ogunlana, as the Super Eagles overcame an opening day debacle to claim a silver medal. He also claimed an FA Cup bronze medal and, by December, Kpakor ended the year the way he had started it: with another winners medal when he led his BCC Lions to conquer Africa in the African Winners Cup competition following a comprehensive 4-1 aggregate defeat of Tunisia’s Club Africain.
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Quite expectedly, he looked forward to the following season with hope and high expectations. His club was going to defend the Winners Cup, they also aimed to win the League title while he hoped to consolidate his position in the national team.
Kpakor went about this three-point agenda with gusto and determination. He saw his team through the preliminaries of the Winners Cup, helped them to a healthy position on the league table and the national team was in a good position to reach the following year’s AFCON in Senegal when disaster struck.
June 15, 1991 will be forever etched in the memory of Moses Kpakor as the day his world came crashing when he was on a pedestal of glory. In a league match against Iwuanyanwu Nationale in Owerri, an overzealous Sylvester Oparanozie, in other to stop the inimitable BCC Lions captain who was controlling and directing the tempo of the game as only a purist can, brutally scythed down Kpakor in a brutal fashion and, surprisingly, escaped without as much as a verbal warning from the referee. Kpakor was down on the turf, agonizing over the fact that he was just three weeks away from signing a lucrative deal with Feyernoord FC of Holland.
He recalls: “In December 1990, Monaco of France as well as Sevilla of Spain showed interest in signing me but were not ready to meet the $120,000 transfer fee demanded by my agent. Finally, Feyenoord agreed to pay the fee and all that was required was for me to go over and sign the papers. Then this injury came and it felt as if the end had come for me.”
So, rather than go to Holland to sign for Feyenoord, Kpakor headed to London for surgery on his right lower limb. After recuperating, he returned to the game but was no longer the bustling all-action player he used to be.
He subsequently missed out on the squad to Senegal 1992 where the Eagles won a bronze medal and his form was not enough to merit a call-up when the qualifiers for both the 1994 World Cup as well as the AFCON for that year began. Thus, sadly, he missed out on what turned out to be the best years of Nigerian football as the team won the AFCON and qualified for the World Cup for the first time ever.
He said, “Certainly, Westerhof would’ve picked me for Senegal ’92, Tunisia ’94 and USA ’94 if I wasn’t injured. Westerhof made several attempts to lure me back to the national team but I resisted. I told him that I wanted to concentrate on my club. Westerhof said in one of the newspapers after the USA ’94 World Cup that Nigeria would’ve progressed in the championship if he had Moses Kpakor in the team. He said I would’ve stopped Roberto Baggio. I’m encouraged by this and I will never forget my time in the national team. That, for me, was the highest praise a player could get from his coach.”
Nevertheless, he went on to win further laurels at club level. He won three more FA Cups in 1993, ’94 and ’97 as well as Super Cups in 1994 and ’95. As a matter of fact, Kpakor is arguably Nigeria’s most decorated FA Cup medals winner with five gold (1987, ’89, ’93, ’94, and ’97), one silver (1985), and two bronze (1988 and ’90). Little wonder he was among 14 legends of the FA Cup honoured by Governor Raji Fashola of Lagos for their contributions and achievement in the competition in 2012. Other distinguished awardees included former national team captains Christian Chukwu and Segun Odegbami as well as the late Teslim Balogun and Haruna Ilerika.
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HONOURED: Kpakor, along with 13 other legends of the FA Cup, were honoured in 2012 by Gov Fashola
Besides his clutch of FA Cup medals, Kpakor was also the proud winner of the Cup Winners, and a runners-up medal in the same competition; an AFCON silver; ECOWAS Cup gold; and a league title win in a 17-year career.
After leaving the game in 1998, he proceeded to the National Institute for Sports, Lagos and obtained an advanced certificate in coaching. Armed with this, he was named Chief Coach of Sharks FC in 2000. Between 2001 and ’02, he was Chief Coach of Lobi Stars of Makurdi and, soon after, was named one of the assistant coaches with the national U-17 team in 2003.
Two years later, he was Technical Adviser to Babanawa FC before bagging the top job at FC Abuja. He got reconnected with his old boss Westerhof at the Kwara Football Academy in 2007 but was soon on his way back to Lobi Stars in the capacity of Team Manager. His tenure was rather short-lived and he left the post after just eight months on the job. He decided to further his education and got admission to the Benue State University to study and improve himself.
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