Former minister of sports, Chief Sunday Dare has taken another look at Nigeria’s inability to qualify for this year’s FIFA World Cup and noted that South Africa showed how it can be achieved with home-based players.
Sports247 reports that Dare also reflected on the Super Eagles’ first qualification for the World Cup at USA ’94 and recalled how the team’s then coach, Clemens Westerhof achieved it with home-based players in his squads.
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Dare, who is now President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s senior adviser on media and public communication, added that the Super Eagles have struggled in recent years because the selectors deviated from a home-grown system that worked effectively.
“Every country has a football development system. Most of them also operate a feeder system, which builds talent from the lower levels into the upper league.
“It is then from the league that players are called into the national team. When that is done, the results will show. It simply means football must have a progressive system and regime for it to have an effective impact.
“Once that is done on a consistent basis, rapid development will be seen. It’s not a matter of one league being better than the other,” Dare reasoned.
He opined further that the Super Eagles excelled in years past because the core of players in the team were from the domestic league, which brought about better blending and well knit understanding among them, compared to what applies nowadays.
Dare recalled, “Nigeria used to have a well-layered system, and once we departed from it, we stumbled. We had a good structure in the days of Clemens Westerhof, when players were invited from the league to the national team.
“That system is gone, and we now rely fully on foreign-based players. We rush them to camp just five days before a game, and we expect them to win.
“We saw the negative effects of that during the World Cup qualifiers against South Africa. Their team had 10 players from the same club in their domestic league playing competitive football together every week.
“We could easily see how they played better as a team. The players understood one another perfectly. On the other hand, our players struggled to blend.
“While the South Africans would pass quickly, because they know each other well, ours will have to look first to see where their teammate was, which often slowed down our attack.”
He concluded by asking pointed questions about the way forward and advocated introduction of a rule that makes the inclusion of home-based players in the Super Eagles mandatory.
The former minister stressed, “We have to start asking ourselves, ‘What system are we operating? What tradition do we have in place?’ We had something that worked before.
“Why can’t we go back to it? We have a DNA in our football, part of which is the passion of our players. That’s why I’m in support of a rule that makes it mandatory for the coach to inject players from the league into his team.”
