By Ikeddy Isiguzo
SOME stand to benefit from Nigeria’s emphatic attention to age group competition where the country excels. The victory over Cameroon at the African Youth Championship gives football something to celebrate after consecutive embarrassments last year at the CAF Nations Cup and the World Cup.

Media reports of the event give the impression that Nigeria has won the World Cup. The junior team of Cameroon is also tagged indomitable lions, to sustain the deceit the young men who went to South Africa performed a feat.

Next, they would be herded to the President who would be asked to reward them for their dominance of Africa. Some of the problems begin there. Even at the U-17 team, we have challenges with appropriate rewards of age grade teams.

Majority of our U-17, we mean people who are about 16 years old should be in secondary school. In exceptional cases, they would be in the early years or university or learning a trade. Where do we get our own players?

If you want to get our players angry, suggest that they be rewarded with scholarships and they will remind you long ago they left school.

The U-20 is not much better. We cannot be deceived by the schemes around the team. John Obuh, the coach is celebrating. He began the competition with complaints about the change in venue because of the crisis in Libya.

After an elaborate training tour of the Mediterranean countries, Obuh said the change in venue to South Africa would affect his team’s chances. Was he surprised to win? Or was the complaint a fall back stand if the team failed?

Victory in South Africa is bad for our football. It consigns our interests again to playing in the junior ranks. We have no ambitions to join the big league.

The disinterest in the future is more telling. Obuh, returned all his players in the controversial 2009 team. He still spent months trying out scores of players, and he could not find a single player worth a place in the U-20, the team that should produce our next set of senior  players. The non-addition of new players has taken off competitions in the team.

Sometimes I wonder where the technical committee of the Nigeria Football Association is. What does it do? Is the committee celebrating the African title? Has it thought of the poor quality this team will offer if it transits to the senior team?

How many members of the team would still be playing football in the next six years when they should be at the peak of their game? Have we not seen this scenario times over in our football?

Obuh’s young men are playing their best football now. The FIFA World Championship in Colombia  may be  their testimonial games – the situation is that serious.

Those who celebrate must ask themselves when our football would aspire to higher honours. We cannot be so desperate about winning that we will lose all sense of probity. We must urgently assess how age grade competitions are ruining our football and stop the rot which we refuse to address when we are     steeped        in       using  over-aged players

Your Mail

Simply Disgusting!
The disgusting issue of age cheating in our football is a problem that seems not to have any solution. However, have we considered the complicity, may be unintentionally, of our information media in the whole mess?

We were in Yaoundé last week for the African Athletics Confederation Congress and it was confounding to observe that most Cameroonians were not aware that their junior national team was involved in any competition in South Africa.

The day they played against Gambia, we (Thisday’s Duro Ikhazuagbe and I) got the results of that game and the Nigeria-Ghana game from Nigeria.  Our media have elevated what ordinarily should be a developmental programme to the Holy Grail of Nigeria’s football. Media attention is so pervasive that our TV stations are running live reports of the competition.

It is mainly as a result of misplaced media attention that the NFA and its coaches use over-aged players so as not to incur the wrath of our  compatriots who have been made to overrate the level of age-grade competitions, should we lose.

What should we do? We should adopt the global practice of reporting such games as footnotes.

Dr. Ken Anugweje, President Nigeria Universities Games Association, NUGA

I totally agree.
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