Dr. Amos Adamu has clarified what he told the House Committee on Sports that last week held a three day hearing on why Nigeria failed in South Africa and the way forward for Nigerian football.

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He had blamed politicians for some ills, saying that coaches receive letters from politicians to include their wards in teams and that sometimes these coaches yield to their demands.

“The message I was trying to pass through was that if all Nigerians faced their area of specialization and contributed from their professional point of view we will be better for it in sports. But we have a situation where the politician wants to hire coach for the Eagles, the lawyer wants to choose players for the coach and the journalist wants to also choose a team.There will be confusion.

Let the politician, the lawmaker ensure that sports get more allocation and do their oversight function to ensure the money is judiciously used, let the lawyer help in ensuring our players and coaches have good contracts and let the journalist promote, criticise and pass information where necessary.

Everybody has a role to play to make sure we thrive in football and sports in general. But we have a situation where everybody wants to run sports. Everybody has become experts in football and this is killing the game.

“We get letters from ministers, senators, House of Representatives members, governors pleading that we should allow certain players into the team and sometimes the coaches find it difficult to reject these players. But when the team fails everybody blames the administrators.”

On the more immediate issue of World Cup failure, Adamu said that the late changing of the technical crew was a clear case of interference that did not help Nigeria. The PTF had insisted on a new coach and they all celebrated when Nigeria lost to Argentina by a lone goal, saying that Lagerback had tried in rejuvenating the Eagles.

They all expected Argentina to maul Nigeria with wider margin. They were claiming credit for what they termed success in a 1-0 defeat.  But when Nigeria still lost to Greece the same PTF now blamed it on the FA.

“The interference did not help us. Again, we could not have succeeded when the house was divided. The PTF and the federation were not together, they worked against each other. The PTF raised money and said that they would build secretariate with it.

FIFA is giving the federation money to build secretariate. Are we going to have two secretariats? The money they raised was meant to help the Eagles in preparation not for secretariat. The federation too did not get some things right, so they are part of the blame but generally everybody should share in the blame.”

Dr Raufu Ladipo of the Supporters Club also blamed government, the federation, the players and coaches for Nigeria’s failure.

“Nigeria made noise about the N900m they approved and I asked the government to say when the money was released for use. The money got to the FA two days after Eagles arrival in South Africa.

That is creating confusion and avenue for people to mismanage the money. This money was meant for preparation and execution of the World Cup and it was getting to the team there in South Africa and you say I should not blame government? Ghana came to South Africa with 2,600 supporters backed by the government. Check that and know that they spent more than Nigeria. We make a lot of noise and expect the best when we don’t work for it. Let’s begin on a new slate because all of us failed,” Dr Ladipo fumed.