Former domestic league sensation, Duke Udi has issued a sweeping verdict that players in the home-based national team were simply not ready for this year’s Championship of African Nations (CHAN 2024).
Sports247 reports that Udi, who shot to national limelight while playing for Shooting Stars Sports Club (3SC) of Ibadan in the Nigerian Professional Football League (NPFL), acknowledged that seeing the CHAN Eagles lose 1-0 to Senegal and 4-0 to Sudan in their first two group matches was a sad sight.
Though the team eventually won their third and last game 2-0 against Congo, it was too little and too late, as the first two defeats had already condemned them to an early flight back home.
Though Udi described it as an educative outing for Nigeria, he posited that it was a huge disappointment and further reckoned that everything was not just right with the squad that failed to go beyond the group stage.
Udi, who later played for FC Grasshopper of Switzerland, expatiated, “It’s a learning process. We’ve learnt that we have to do the right thing at the right time. If you do the wrong thing, you’ll always get the wrong results. If you do the right thing, you’ll get the right results.”
He then cast a look back at the early days of the CHAN 2024 squad and opined that they were doomed to fail from the word go, considering that their preparations for the championship were not tidy.
The soft-talking ex-international, who also starred for Nigeria’s ill-fated under-20 squad at the 1995 African Youth Championship (AYC), which the country hosted at Onikan Stadium in Lagos, further pointed out: “If you look at our preparation, you would see that we were not prepared for this competition.
“That’s my take and my personal opinion … we were not ready for this CHAN competition. What we got was what we deserved, anyway. So, we need to learn from that and move forward.”
The former enterprising attacker concluded by advocating better attention to developing players in the NPFL and ruled out any home-based lad from being part of the upcoming FIFA World Cup qualifiers.
“We have to begin the process again and start from somewhere with a better approach. Let’s look at everything we’ve learnt, then take the positives and correct the negatives.
“That’s what I just believe and, for the World Cup qualifiers, we have to just stick with our foreign-based players. That’s my take,” declared the former enfant terrible.
