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Euphoria hailed the decision of the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) to appoint young UEFA-certified coach, Eboboritse Uwejamomere, as the new coach of the Nigeria Under-17 team.
Many football fans were excited by the fact that a young coach with modern ideas is leading the team, a clear departure from the act of recycling coaches for a team that has not produced much in recent times.
Nigeria has failed to qualify for the last two editions of the U-17 World Cup, a tournament in which it holds the honor of being the most decorated team in history with five titles.
Many will want to disagree, but the team’s recent failure has little to nothing to do with training, rather the haphazard nature of the team’s preparation for the tournament.
Due to the lack of an organized structure or a proper U15-U17 league in the country, the old method of using open screenings is still in place. A practice that has become obsolete and out of fashion.
Most of the time, at least in the last four years, up to 1,000 young footballers will gather at the Goal Project football field in Abuja to be assessed by coaches. It is generally done one or two months before the playoffs.
Coaches will select the best they can see and place others who came through recommendations from trusted associates into a different group. Next will be the mandatory MRI test, popularly known as MRI test.
Nigeria’s bottom six teams at this level have regrouped after the test aimed at curbing age fraud. The test of experience usually erases most of the regulars, leaving the coaches to begin the process of raising a new team in a few days either for a tournament or the playoffs.
Two years ago, they began the process of testing players before coming to camp, but it did not yield the expected results, so they returned to the practice of choosing a group of over 100 players for testing.
For young coach Eboboritse to be successful, the system must be much simpler and less cumbersome. He triumphed with the Sporting Lagos youth project, but he arrives at a field that is a trap and has all the recipes for failure as previous coaches have seen.
Perhaps working as an assistant before his promotion to head coach would have helped, but Nduka Ugbade, who walked that rope, also failed largely due to the obsolete, mundane and disorganized pattern of operation mentioned above.
The NFF, as we all know, is not open to changing ideas, approaches and modes of operation, because most of the time they have square pegs in round holes holding sensitive positions with little or no idea on how to properly function in such a capacity.
As the old saying goes “You can’t give what you don’t have.” I hope Eboboritse Uwejamomere succeeds, but the odds are clearly and firmly against him.
Mohammed Mowiz Suleiman
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