Abdul Razaq Ibrahim, Abeokuta
Chief Adegboye Onigbinde, a former coach of the national team, the Super Eagles, has berated poor performance and failure to discover football talents from the grassroots level by many Nigerian coaches as a major problem for development of national football and sports in general.
Onigbinde said that Nigerian coaches’ failure to discover talents from every nook and cranny of the country and quests for ready-made stars in and outside the country, “are killing Nigeria football” and urgent action must be taken to address the anomalies in order to bring back “the old good days”.
He said, “Why can’t we have six teams that can represent us? We can achieve that if there is a collaboration with Zonal and State Football Associations. South-West like other zones are very rich in football talents but, we are not identifying them. Coaches should have abilities to identify the football talents, not stars.”
The Ex-Super Eagles Coach, who spoke at a maiden South-West States Football Summit held on Friday in Abeokuta, revealed that CAF C-Licence Coaching Course established in Nigeria for coaches in the last six years had only produced 400 coaches, while that of Ghana, Ivory Coast and other small countries in Africa had trained not less than 4000 coaches each.
“About six years ago, we started Confederation of African Football, CAF-Grading Courses for Coaches, but about three years ago, we have been having problems and CAF is not happy about it since we have only trained 400 coaches, while countries like Ghana, Ivory Coast and others have trained over 4000 coaches each under the scheme”, he said.
While explaining that Nigeria Super Eagles could have six different teams if coaches could develop abilities to discover football talents abound in the country, revealed that every Nigerian coach should take a cue from the late Coach Teslim Balogun in terms of his quest and penchant for home-grown players, adding that it was the late caoch that discovered him.
He said, “every coach should be like Teslim Balogun in the way they should discover football talents and train them. It was Teslim Balogun who forced me into coaching; he had eyes to discover talents, he would pick football talents by roads side and knew how to groom them.”