Blame us for Super Falcons’ defeat, Pinnick admits

The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) President, Amaju Pinnick, has confessed that over-concentration on the Super Eagles World Cup campaign, which resulted in inadequate preparation by the Super Falcons, was the reason for the woeful 8-0 loss to France in Friday’s international friendly.

A hat-trick by Valérie Gauvin, with goals from Eugénie Le Sommer, Gaetane Thiney, Aminata Diallo, Marie-Charlotte Léger and an own goal from Super Falcon’s Faith Ikidi gave the host of this year’s Women’s World Cup, France victory over the Falcons.

The defeat is the first real test for the newly recruited Coach Thomas Dennerby, where the reigning African footballer of the year, Asisat Oshoala, was missing after a late withdrawal.

‘’Our Super Falcons team is the best female team in Africa. Our pride in them will never waver. As with any friendly match, the game against France was more for the technical team to look at the players now and see who and what will fit.

‘’The result, though very lopsided just shows how much work is in front of us. We concentrated a lot of our efforts on our Super Eagles, but it was unintentional.

‘’It was mainly due to situations beyond our control and not limited to finance. Our female football teams have always done us proud. ‘’Hopefully, we will do them proud as well. So, I would like to just tell Nigerians that I, the Executive Committee and Management of the NFF, are all very proud of our Super Falcons and we know they will make us proud as they usually do.‘’One bad experimental result does not change a priceless asset; our dear Super Falcons,’’ he said.

Meanwhile, Super Falcons striker, Desire Oparanozie, has explained that the loss was as a result of inadequate preparation by the team.“To be honest, I think we didn’t have adequate preparation going into this game, taking into consideration the fact that we were inactive for as long as we were – 16 months.

“We are the champions of Africa and we can all say it was rightly deserving. However, we can’t deny the fact that while we were out, our opposition has been busy getting stronger.

“They were definitely more prepared than we were. They began camping before us, even though most of them are home based. The bulk of us came from outside France and had just one full day of training together before match day,” Oparanozie told BBC Sport.