Former coach of the Nigerian national team, Sunday Oliseh, wrote that coaching, in addition to other things, are currently challenging the Super Eagles
Oliseh in his column said it’s a ‘gigantic erroneous belief’ to think that coaching is the sole reason the Super Eagles are struggling.
Oliseh wrote on “Life is A Sport” and said there are more problems bedeviling the national team including the failure of developmental processes.
“I am totally amazed at the Gigantic erroneous belief by some compatriots, that the disastrous problem of Nigeria in the recent past 6 years is limited to just poor coaching of the super Eagles.
”True the coaching is an integral crucial part of the crisis, but not totally the sole reason. This error can only be fuelled if you really falsely believe that the National team’s coach is solely responsible for creating talented great Eagles players. In fact, the National Coach in France, for clarity reasons on this, is called “le selectioneur” and not “l’entrainer” you got it… Selector and not Coach!,” he wrote.
Oliseh said Nigerians are talented and it’s evident in how Clemens Westerhof and Jo Bonfere struggled in other countries after leaving Nigeria.
While he hailed their coaching, he added that a lot of their successes could be ascribed to the quality of players in the league.
“The much-acclaimed and successful former super eagles coaches, Clemence Westerhoff and Jo Bonfrere excelled with the Super eagles with players produced from the then Vibrant Nigerian Local league, but they could not achieve any other notable success once they left Nigeria to work in other countries. That speaks volumes I believe of the Nigerian capabilities. There is something special in our 200 million-plus population.
“This is in no way minimizing their contributions to our legendary status back then, on the contrary, they were good but they achieved relative great success thanks to the local qualitative players they had to work with, the then fanatical Nigerian super eagles fan base, etc.”
Austin Eguavoen failed to guide Nigeria to the 2022 World Cup, missing the ticket to Ghana in March.
