By Tolu Atobatele
The Eagles were a shadow of themselves in the first match of the two games played last Friday. The game ended 1-0 in favour of Cameroon while the second match played earlier this evening ended goalless.
The Super Eagles put up a very woeful performance as they drew blank in the two friendly matches against the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon in Austria.
The Nigerian team failed to live up to expectations and lack cohesion. The passes were poor with lack of purpose and directions in both games.
One important thing obvious in the two matches was lack of technical input from the German coach Gernot Rohr who continued to exhibit his technical deficiency and reason he should not be saddled with the responsibility of managing the team.
The coach prior to the games complained of lack of quality in a team that had the 2020/2021 Belgian Jupiler League top scorer Paul Onuachu with over 30 goals, the resurgent Leicester City Kelechi Iheanacho, who took the shine off Jamie Vardy in the second half of the English Premier League Season and Wilfred Ndidi, one of the best defensive midfielder in the English Premier League.
Lorient striking sensation Terem Moffi was on fire for his club last season while Simmy Nwankwo scored 20 goals for lowly Crotone, a modest club in the Italian Serie A.
Rather than harness these talents to get the desired results the coach is busy lamenting lack of quality in the team of which confirms that he’s bereft of ideas to lead the team to glory.
The Super Eagles will probably qualify for the 2022 Fifa World Cup in Qatar but the dream will surely fade out with Gernot Rohr in charge and NFF hasn’t done anything good at all allowing Rohr to still take charge of proceedings- Nigeria may go to the world cup just to add up the numbers.
Nigeria might have luck on her and get to the semi-final of the AFCON in Cameroon even as the coach himself posited that his team do not posses the quality to win the tournament compared to countries like Cote d’ Voire, Senegal and host of other top African teams.
The NFF has refused to see what soccer fans are seeing instead celebrated the bronze the team won in 2019 and the German was rewarded with a bumper contract to keep him on the job. Five years in the saddle of things he has not been able to build a solid and compact team that Nigerians will be proud of.
At the 2018 world cup in Russia the world had expected the Super Eagles to get out of a group that had a rag-tag Argentina, Croatia and Iceland but to the surprised of many the team was bundled out at the group stage no thanks to his (Rohr) technical and tactical ineptitude which cost the team greatly.
It is a pity that rather than moving forward, the team has been on a decline since the German was hired. His backers would point to the fact that he qualified Nigeria for major tournaments with games to spare. Good. Apart from that what else?
The longer the so called German expatriate stays on the job the more decline the team experience and this inflicts severe sorrows on the avid soccer fans. The Nigeria Football Federation should come out and tell Nigerians why it is so difficult to part ways with the coach.
Sport Angle Int'l- SAI SPORTS 