By KATE OBODO
Former Super Eagles assistant coach Joe Erico has said that the only way out of the wood for Nigeria’s football is resuscitation of all the youth football programmes that had been abandoned for years.

With the chain of bad results in recent times starting from the Super Eagles to the U-23 team at the on- going Olympic qualifier in Morocco, 2011 have been termed a bad year for the country’s football.

However, for Erico, it is not over as he believes it is high time the country gets back to school sports programmes if the country must succeed in her football again.

“I am not going to apportion blames to anybody but I look at it as a trend of events. Negative as it is, we should learn from it since we did not learn from the positive aspect of it.

Like I said earlier, we have to dig deep to develop our football. We have to go back to good things, all we need now is to go back to the basics, think very deeply and reactivate all the youth programmes that we have abandoned for years, especially school sports programmes. If we put them in the right positions, then we will get what we want at the end of the day.

On coach Austin Eguavoen’s comment that Dutch club, VVV Venlo reneged on their promise to release Ahmed Musa, Erico said, “as far as I am concerned, the Under-23 team is supposed to be filled with home-based players and not foreign-based player, so it is not an excuse.

Nigeria has over 150 million people with a rich pool of talented players that could have been polished to stardom. If we have a good development programme, we would have had a reservoir, from the U-17, U-20 to Under-23. So it is not a good excuse, he has failed and he has failed,” he said.