Ethiopian coach Iffy Onuora admitted that the Eagles killed off the courage of his inexperienced side when they scored an early goal in their Nations Cup qualifiers last Sunday.

Iffy Onuora

He said he would now be under pressure to win his next three games to have a realistic chance of going to the 2012 Nations Cup.

“We lost to a better side and I must say the early goal destabilised us and we found it difficult to recover from that. I guess they studied our team and they ensured that we did not play our normal football.

“There is pressure everywhere when you lose games in football; there will always be questions from the administrators. We fell short of what we hoped to achieve today (March 27) but that should not be much of a worry.

We still have three more games to play in the qualifiers including two home games. With the situation now, we are down but not out. We can still make an impact and create upsets in the remaining games of the qualifiers.

“The Super Eagles have a lot of quality players. They had a rich bench with great players and you could see that the introduction of players like Osaze Odemwingie and Ike Uche actually unsettled us.

But I will single out Joel Obi because he is a wonderful player and I believe he is going to get better with time. He is such a great gift to Nigeria and he really impressed me. The Nigerian side we played against are better than Guinea who beat us at home.”