Confused – Like Country, Like Football

Change is the only constant thing in life – Nigeria must have overlearned this.

It’s astonishing to see how we wake up and bring ‘crazy’ ideas and implement them hastily and I am not talking about the old new national anthem now, I don’t intend to write a book now at least not on this topic.

One cannot but imagine the height consistency would have taken us to in football, I want to skip the days of Phillipi Troussier – the white witch doctor and many more afterward and will also skip the time Gernot Rohr would have taken us to his second consecutive Nations cup and World cup as Nigeria’s coach and how our ‘creativity’ in the glass house led us to miss the World cup and become a ‘beautiful spectator’ in preceding African cup of Nations. I don’t want to start from there.

See how the Super Eagles went from almost winning the afcon just a few months ago to being the real whipping boys. One would have expected that Coach Pesserio would have been retained especially as he exceeded the target set before him. But as Nigerians woke up again to see that Nigeria was not playing like Barcelona, victory was not enough again.

So the two years of experience would again be pushed down the spreading machine since we seek ‘a country we know not’ and as if that’s not amazing enough we then saddle the responsibility to a Coach without the experience or track record to show that he could do the job (with all due respect to the legendary Finidi George) simply based on the fact that He is Nigerian as if that is what frightens opposing defenders, as against a globally tested tactician with the excuse of ‘we can’t pay a foreign coach’.

Then after sacrificing two World Cup qualifying matches and five points suddenly we can now afford a foreign Coach whereas if we wanted to promote the ‘Nigerian coach brand’ we would have even been ready to sacrifice the World Cup to say we are building something but we have even always been building or rebuilding since 2002 but it seems the cement too get sand.

But how do you expect the running of the football house to be different from the running of the country when it’s done by the same people who woke up one morning in 2015 and cried for change since there was corruption and the roads were bad as well as the electricity, without checking the antecedence of the people whom they trusted with the task even though they had a track record to cross-check with but since change is so sweet why must they take time to think about it?

No, we must not take our time to ask critical questions, we must plan with miracles but a time is coming and the time is now when we must enjoy or endure the consequences of every decision we have taken but sadly the young ones must share in the harvest they didn’t sow so we have made them our whipping boys.