Does ‘juju’ win football games?

This is the second installment of a three-part series and, given the way you guys received and passionately debated the first part: “IS THERE ‘LUCK’ IN FOOTBALL?”, I hope you find this one and the final part still to come as enjoyable as well.

After dealing with the contentious issue of luck in football in the first part of this trilogy and having reached a conclusion based on all your mails that for one to be ‘lucky’ in football, he must work hard and create his own luck by letting his preparation meet with opportunity, I want us to critically examine the role and efficacy of juju (or jazz or black magic or by any other name you want to call it) in football.

I have a personal experience that I will share here and others of which I can speak with authority to a certain degree. I recall that some four years ago, I recounted the exploits of my high school football team and how we had a very talented team that broke some records in the history of our school by going all the way to the semi-finals of the Principal’s Cup in the old Oyo State.

This, you should remember, was when the Principal’s Cup was the competition of choice among schools and the quality was so high that I do not exaggerate if I said some of those schools will easily play in today’s Nigerian Premier League and win honours.

Yea, those who were old enough in the 1980s will understand what I’m talking about. As a quick aside, I remember my big bros, Tosin Adebambo, ex-IICC Shooting Stars of Ibadan defender, told me his old Ibadan Grammar School football team will give today’s Super Eagles a good run for their money. Knowing how good that team was and the exploits most of them went on to make in international football for Nigeria, I can tell you it was not an idle boast.

Anyway, back to my school. In our run to the semi-finals, we played against a team in the earlier rounds and, in the first five minutes we had created more than a dozen goal-scoring chances but, quite uncharacteristically, we couldn’t convert a single one. We camped in their half of the pitch and took them apart with some incisive passing and dribbles but we still couldn’t score even with the goalkeeper already beaten.

Then, suddenly against the run of play and in their only foray into our own half, they scored with their only shot on target for 45 minutes! The whole stadium went deathly quiet because nobody could explain what had just happened.

Most of the spectators who had come to watch our team play were dumbfounded and, at half-time, one of them approached our bench and drew our attention to the fact that the opposition goalkeeper carried an extra pair of gloves which he put inside his own net and that, as long as the gloves remained there, no goal will pass through him.

On resumption of the second-half, we prevented the goalkeeper from putting the gloves in the net and our coach had to sign an undertaken that he would refund the cost should the gloves be missing when the keeper insisted that he wanted the gloves close to him for safe-keeping. This argument held up play for another 10minutes or so until it was finally resolved and the gloves removed from the net. We promptly put FIVE goals past the keeper to end the game 5-1.

The incident re-enforced the belief of those who said juju or black magic existed in football. Even now, almost three decades after the incident, I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that Juju was at work against us in that game.

Do you think the guy’s glove actually contained juju as claimed or we were just not good enough to score against him in the first half? How come that we suddenly found our rhythm and put five past him immediately the gloves were removed from inside his goalpost? Co-incidence?

If you remember also, in the quarter-final game of AFCON 2000 between Nigeria and Senegal, the Super Eagles won the tie 2-1 with two late goals by Julius Aghahowa but that was ONLY after Coach Kashimawo Laloko, who was head of the NFA Technical department at the time, had stepped into the Senegalese goalkeeper’s goal-post to remove an object he claimed was juju.

Laloko got hammered by CAF for encroaching on the field of play but he got his way and Nigeria got the needed victory. Did Laloko’s intervention nullify the goalkeeper’s juju or was it mere happenstance that we scored two goals immediately he picked up those objects?

I know of a certain club in the Nigerian league, and I’m sure there are others too, where players’ shirts are soaked in a concoction days before a game in order to guarantee victory. I know of another club where the players are given certain potions to put on their bodies for protection against any juju employed by the opposing team. And I certainly know, for a fact, that a good number of Nigerian club-sides and the national teams set aside a substantial amount of money to pay for ‘spiritual services’ in the course of the season.

In the early 90s, precisely in the 1992 season, a Republic of Benin international player (I will keep his name out of this write-up), greatly talented guy he was, signed on with a club in the Nigerian Premier League but I doubted if he played up to six games in the whole season. This was because he had a terrible affliction of Whitlow on two fingers of his right hand which prevented him from playing as much as his talent suggested. He claimed the player with whom he played in the same wing cast a spell (juju) on him and he left at the end of that single season.

During the 2014 World Cup qualifiers, I was in Addis Ababa when the Super Eagles took on Ethiopia and, on match-day, I noticed a group of Ethiopians who cordoned off a part of the stadium, removed their left shoes and were mouthing some incoherent incantations. This went on for a long time until the end of the match. If it was done so that the Walyas could defeat the Super Eagles then it didn’t work because Nigeria won 2-1 on the day.

 

I’m aware that in Franco-phone countries such as Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast, among others, the belief and use of juju is so widespread that it has national significance. I remember in the pre-game formalities between Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire in Abidjan for the 1994 World Cup qualifiers, some spiritualist warned the Eagles that their opponents will be bringing a lot of juju to the Stadium to cast a spell on them.

To counter this and render the juju impotent, he allegedly warned, the players must not shake hands with any Ivorien official or player before the game. Therefore, the Nigerian players shunned the proffered hand of the Ivorien Minister of Sport. The Elephants reciprocated by refusing to shake our own leader of delegation. On the pitch, the Ivoriens won 2-1, coming from behind after going down to Rashidi Yekini’s early goal. So, I ask, who had the better juju on the day?

For those who have watched football games at the Houphuet Boigny Stadium in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, you cannot fail to miss this fat man with a pot billowing fire on his head all through the game, especially when the Elephants are playing.

The question to ask here is simple: if juju truly exists in football, why have we not seen an African country winning the World Cup. Or why, for instance, did it take Africa until 2009 to win the World Youth Championship since its inception in 1977? Does the fact that European countries have won the FIFA World Cup 11 times and South American nations on nine occasions mean that the juju in these two continents are stronger than those in Africa and elsewhere?

Please note that I have not challenged anybody’s belief in juju or disparage those who do so. I only want us to find out to what extent it works in football and why it has not answered the above questions rationally. When we do this, we would be the better for it because many age-old questions would have been answered.

March 4, 2015