Raise new Eagles, Nigerians charge

Nigerians from all walks of life have charged Super Eagles coach, Sunday Oliseh to focus now on building a new football team in the country.

According to them, our footballers playing abroad have been doing relatively well especially since they have started the season with a bang. This is good in the interest of our football as our strikers have stopped being rusty place fillers and now transformed to genuine goal scorers.

They point to the fact that Ahmed Musa and Odion Ighalo have been firing goals regularly for their clubs, even as Victor Moses has been a revelation on the wings in the new look Westham side. According to them therefore, it is time for Oliseh to stop looking endlessly at players like Mikel Obi and Emmanuel Emenike who have not been in the best of form recently.

‘Oliseh should look for players who are enjoying the best form and game time possible for their clubs. Clearly if Mikel still wants to be a regular, he has to leave Chelsea and move to a club where he will be able to play more regularly than at Chelsea where he has been frozen out by Cesc Fabregas and Nmenja Matic,’ one local football enthusiast enthused.

According to him, Emenike should be dropped completely from the team at this time. He however refuses to agree that Mikel should be dropped. His reason for the latter view is that while they are a lot of in-form attackers for the eagles who are scoring regularly, there is no serious midfield enforcer as the ones who are now being played regularly – Joel Obi, Lukman Haruna and Obiora Nwankwo – fall short of the desired quality in one way or the other.

In his own words: “my advice to Oliseh is to quickly wrap up the future of young starlets who today have the opportunity to pick Nigeria or any other country of their choice to prevent a situation where Nigeria would continue losing players to other countries as was the case recently in the Jordon Ibe scenario”.

“Look at David Alaba who is one of the best in the world in his position; he is playing for Austria instead of Nigeria, look at Emmanuel Adebayor, one of the finest black strikers of all time after Samuel Eto to grace the world stage and play for clubs like Arsenal, Manchester City, Real Mardid and Tottenham Hotspur; he is playing for our smaller neighbour, Togo. The situation is really embarrassing, we are throwing away stars which we definitely need,” he said.