What the Super Eagles need is a manager and not a coach. In the national team, there is less coaching and more player management; less technical training and more tactical planning – a very thin but delicate difference. Coaching is about teaching players the rudiments of how and what to play through repeated practise.
Management is telling them what strategies to play at short notice, and hoping they do so! Coaching requires a lot of time and rehearsals to master a winning strategy. Managing is a quick-fix of tactics and organisation That’s why the best coaches of clubs hardly ever consider being managers of national teams. The two roles have very different approaches. The best news out of African football is that Nigeria has finally bowed to the voices of reason to end the ugly, mental enslavement of coaches on the basis of the colour of their White skin, ahead of better experienced and better qualified local coaches.
Finidi George, an experienced Nigerian ex-international player with the highest qualifications is the manager Nigeria needs at this time, a gentleman to the core, one commanding great admiration and respect from the players, administrators and fans. His success will be determined by the number of exceptionally-gifted players he is able to assemble at very short notice to play as close to a team as possible.
To have several players come from a particular club or league often helps. But the most important ingredient is having a collection of extremely gifted players for all the positions. Nigeria is enroute to achieving that. Ademola Lookman – finally, greatness! There is a very thin line separating a very good player from greatness. That transition often comes in a sudden boost of needed fuel ‘idling’ in every good player’s mind. There is a talented football player sought after by many clubs, big and small. For a few seasons, he plays from match aftermatch displaying occasional glimpses of something exceptional without quite getting there, convincingly. He sometimes moves from one club to another, brandishing those flashes of brilliance but ending up with a shortfall in self-belief and consistency that are needed for greatness.
Then, one day, it happens. He finds a great coach who helps him to make the transition aided by conspiringelements. Mother-luck offers the player the gift of an opportunity which, if exploited, provides the perfect platform for the player to be launched into the stratosphere of greatness! In one match of magic, it happens and everything changes in the player’s career and even life.
I know because it happened to me. For several years at the start of my football career I was doing well, earning personal accolades, winning some important matches for club and even the country, winning local cups and championships including the league and even the FA Cup, topping the league’s goal-scorers charts for three consecutive years, and even scoring the most number of goals in winning Nigeria’s first African club cup. I was the first Nigerian football player to be listed in the top ten (and ended up as Third) best players in Africa in 1977, when I was not fully aware of just how good I was and could be.
Through all of that period, I was just a very good player, not very consistent, afraid to take certain risks, unappreciative of my depth in the game and how good I was despite all the shower of encomiums. Even when I was the most celebrated football player at the eve of the 1978 AFCON in Ghana, and ended up as a joint highest goalscorer, I was still not convinced, in the depths of my mind, of my true capability.
Then it happened on that fateful and eventful evening of March 22, 1980. Buoyed by some good fortune, I flew like I had never flown before, played without fear and with a certain conviction, scored two goals created in heaven, and contributed to earning for Nigeria its greatest trophy at the time.
In the 90 minutes of that match, I knew for the first time, what greatness was: knowing what to do beyond the ordinary; being unafraid; deliberately aware of one’s capability; playing like the greats of football – cool, calm, sure, confident and deadly!
When I scored a brace (I could have scored more), it was the turning point of my football playing, the transition point from being good to being great. Not every player gets to that point of realisation.
