When Eagles fail to fly

The country’s senior national team, the Super Eagles, who are the current African champions, battled to a 2-2 draw in a crucial African Cup of Nations qualifier against South Africa’s Bafana Bafana in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State. The Eagles needed a victory to secure qualification.With this dismal result, South Africa and Congo secured the two […]

The country’s senior national team, the Super Eagles, who are the current African champions, battled to a 2-2 draw in a crucial African Cup of Nations qualifier against South Africa’s Bafana Bafana in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State. The Eagles needed a victory to secure qualification.
With this dismal result, South Africa and Congo secured the two automatic tickets in Group A, ahead of the Super Eagles, and left the teeming Nigerian football fans in sour mood. It set an inglorious precedence too because the Eagles’ defeat marked the first time a defending champion would fail to qualify for the biennial tournament.
Of course this is no time for buck-passing; it is one for sober reflection and serious soul-searching.
Though the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) has taken full responsibility for the Eagles’ ouster, it is pertinent to call a spade by its name. The Presidency, the NFF, the coaches and players are all culpable for their roles in the national team’s ignominious exit.
Federal Government officials had instigated crisis in the NFF after the World Cup finals in Brazil which culminated in the precipitate removal of the Aminu Maigari-led Executive Committee, and caused Nigeria’s shambolic AFCON qualifying campaign. Rather than taking stock and planning ahead, Nigeria’s football administrators were engrossed in power tussle. The crisis that engulfed the Glass House after the national team’s poor outing at the last World Cup assumed an embarrassing dimension, and it was entirely avoidable.  
The way forward for Nigerian football is that its football authorities must return to the drawing board. They should immediately disband the Super Eagles, including the Stephen Keshi-led technical crew. Fundamentally, President Goodluck Jonathan did a greater harm when he ill-advisedly intervened and ordered that Keshi be recalled to manage the team in the remaining two matches. The NFF had earlier replaced him with Amodu Shaibu following the poor run of results in the qualifying series. The fact that the Eagles struggled all through the qualifiers in a Group adjudged to be fair for Nigeria suggested that the coaching crew lacked the technical expertise to take Nigerian football to loftier heights.
Those heights seemed achievable two years ago when Nigeria stood triumphant on South African soil, having vanquished all comers. In the grander scheme of things, that victory should have marked a needed resurgence. Instead it now looked more like some freakish spike in the graph.
Keshi has surely run his course as Eagles coach. His tenure has been the perfect heroin trip, a mind-bending high, and now a low, even more crushing than the one he picked the team up from in 2011.
 The reality is that the present crops of players are not up to par, so cannot dominate Africa.
The only way to get the national sport back on track is for the NFF to do what it should have done long ago for other reasons: sort out the country’s domestic football.  It calls for meticulous planning and execution. The sport administrators should concentrate on rebuilding football at the grassroots and restructuring the leagues and their administration.
The NFF should use this window period to organize international friendly matches to establish a formidable new Super Eagles. Overhauling the national team should also involve establishing a structure for the country’s leagues. Doing so will further strengthen the age-grade national teams towards making them form a strong base and be a conveyor belt for the national team. Only then would Nigeria be able to build a decent senior national team worthy of that name. That is the way to regain Nigerian football’s glory lost in the last AFCON.