Goals for the 2010 World Cup

The National Sports Commission has set a target for the Eagles: win a place in the 2010 World Cup semi-finals. This was revealed by Sani Lulu Abdullahi, Nigerian Football Federation President.

I love the Eagles. We have been fairly successful in African competition in the 39 years of the modern football era (i.e. since 1970). Still I would say we have underperformed somewhat. We have not lacked for opportunity, but have been persistently weak at converting opportunities.

In three decades of Nations Cups from 1978 to 2008, Egypt won five titles from five finals (a 100% conversion rate), Cameroun four from five finals (80% rate), and Ghana two from three (66%). In the same period, Nigeria reached the final six times, the most of any team, but won only twice (33%).

Our true conversion rate is actually worse. Due to the 1996 boycott and 1998 suspension, the Eagles participated in 14 of 16 Nations Cup tourneys between 1978 and 2008, and finished in the top three 11 times. Effectively we won just 2 continental titles from 11 golden opportunities – an 18% rate.

It reads like a metaphor about our federal republic – gifted with golden opportunities lost or wasted.

The Eagles are a perennial big fish in the continental lake, but have made no sustained impact on the ocean that is global football. I do not mind being a top dog in Africa; I wish Nigeria had the most African titles, not Egypt, and that we had beaten Cameroun in those three finals. But the lack of global success makes the African success seem hollow.

Our women’s national team, the Falcons, crystallized my thoughts in this regard. The Falcons absolutely dominated Africa for two decades, with nothing to show for it at the Women’s World Cup or Olympics other than a single Cinderella run to the final eight in 1999. If the continent’s female juggernaut is a relative weakling in global competitions, you have to conclude the quality of Africa’s women’s teams is poor in global terms – which gives me the same feeling about our continental success as I get when I read about teams winning the East African CECAFA Senior Challenge (a competition made up of teams that never qualify for the Nations Cup – no offence).

And is it really different on the men’s side? I mean, we hype the quality of our superstars, and make fun of “boastful” teams like England (never mind that we have never equalled their World cup record), but in cold hard reality, what have we done to back up the boasts?

It pains me as a Nigerian to admit it, but if you add up the statistics for both the Nations Cup and World Cup, the Lions of Cameroun were the most successful African team of the last 31 years (i.e. from 1978); and other than a single Cinderella run to the quarterfinals in 1990, the Lions did little at the World Cup. Before anyone blames the African qualification process, the Lions qualified five times in those 31 years, plenty of time and opportunity to show steady upward progress, but were knocked out at the preliminary stage four times (same as that other perennial qualifier, Tunisia).

Egypt, Nigeria and Ghana, who are arguably the second, third and fourth best African teams since 1978 could complain about not qualifying enough. But I don’t think the qualification format was Nigeria’s problem. Remember what I said about our problem with converting opportunities? We only barely lost out on World Cup places in 1978, 1990 (to Cameroun) and 2006. My memories of 1978 are fuzzy, but off-the-field issues between players, administrators and managers decided our fates in 1990 and 2006. With that said, Nigeria is the only African team to make it out of the preliminary round of the World Cup more than once, the closest thing Africa has got to a team who can argue that their good performance was not a one-off fluke. But is a Second Round exit really a “good” performance? Should we act and think as if “Second Round” is the best we can achieve? Oh, I am sorry, what am I saying, we didn’t even qualify in 2006, and I am raising my hopes for getting past the Second Round.

I am focusing only on full senior international football. Our record in age-restricted events does not count. Why get excited after victory over a bunch of boys, if we will not be able to beat them when they are men? We beat Brazil in the 1996 Olympics semi-final, but it was Brazil who went on to the 1998 World Cup final and the 2002 World Cup title. The Brazilians thought it a failure to be knocked out of the 2006 World Cup at the quarterfinal stage – Nigeria can only dream of such “failure”. And after winning that Under-23 title (using senior team players who had already won a Nations Cup and played a World Cup) we decided an all-attack, no-defence team could “score 16 if they score 15” at the 1998 World Cup (with apologies to Dan Amokachi). It did not happen, did it? Yes, we continued to do “well” in Africa, but where is the world-level payoff? After watching our senior team huff and puff to a bland exit against grown men at Ghana’08, I was not consoled by watching our Beijing’08 team utterly dominate young boys. It was exciting 24 years ago when we won the Under-17 World Championship, but I would trade the Under-17 trophies we won in 2007 for a third Nations Cup crown or a single appearance at a World Cup semi-final. Heck, I’d trade our 1996 Olympic gold medal for a 1998 World Cup semi-final place!

Youth competition is useful only insofar as it gives tournament experience to players who could step up to the senior team. The 2005 Under-21 World Championship gave us John “Mikel” Obi and Taiye Taiwo. The highlight of Beijing’08 for me was the intelligent performance of Solomon Okoronkwo; not since Finidi have I seen such a natural at right-midfield in an Eagles jersey. And while the jury is still out on the 2007 Under-17 African and World Champs, Rabiu Ibrahim could make the step up, with a bit more maturity – but only if we stop the “new JJ” talk, and ponder instead how he will differ from left-midfield predecessors Emmanuel Amunike and Garba Lawal.

At the senior level, Nigeria’s Eagles have been in decline since 1994, and even then we were not as strong as our hagiographic memories make us out to have been. In fact, we would have been better off if in 1994-1996 we had spent more time thinking about our weak points, and less time celebrating our self-anointed status as Africa’s first world football power. We have continued to decline, fifteen years now, all the while still so insistent that we are the best. Hey, we win kiddie trophies and African Women’s Cups, right? The Nigerian Football Federation wasted a million dollar corporate sponsorship paying German managers, because they (like we) believed that the team was really okay, that the only problem was Nigerian managers didn’t know how to bring out the alleged strength of the team. At the end of the day, not only was Ghana’08 our worst Nations Cup, but we lost to Cote d’Ivoire in 2008 by the same score-line as the 2006 loss that cost Austin Eguavoen his job.

Why am I sounding this harsh? Simple: We will never work as hard as we have to transform our fortunes if we never admit just how far behind our long-term goal we actually are. We continue to act as if all we need is a little tweak, as if beating Sierra Leone means our problems have gone away.

The Eagles are a more important symbol of Nigeria than the flag or the anthem. We must arrest the decline, make a U-turn, and begin climbing back up towards the top. And not just the top of Africa; we must strive to join the GLOBAL football elite.

But here it is not going to happen overnight. It has been 15 years of continuous decline, and we are not going to zip into the World Cup semi-finals barely two years after a forgettable Ghana’08.

We must set simple targets, with simple timelines, and simple methods of measuring our progress towards those goals. Instead of a series of presidents promising to fix the entire electricity mess, why not a simple promise at the beginning of the year to add X-thousand mega-watts to the grid by the end of the year? We citizens can then monitor the construction or rehabilitation of a power station over the following year to see if anything is actually being done to fulfil the target. If it works, set another simple target for the following year, and if it fails, figure out why it failed by the beginning of the following year.

The same applies in football.

As far as the World Cup is concerned, our goal is to QUALIFY. After the disaster of 2006, we need to put aside our hubris and pomposity, and just work on qualifying.

If we qualify, and only if we qualify, we can then move to the next goal – creating a team that will be competitive in our guaranteed three matches at the World Cup. Any expectation other than that, and we set ourselves up to fail in the long-term, because we will end up sacking the team’s manager and perhaps disbanding the team for not living up to our unrealistic hopes.

The Eagles have had 10 managers in the last 11 years. Our current manager, Amodu Shuaibu, had three stints in that time, so we have really had 12 managerial episodes in 11 years. We have also “experimented” with and capped a prodigiously large number of players. And all of that added up to the bland display at Ghana’08.

Why don’t we do something different? We can make a plan, something we talk a lot about but rarely do, and give a single manager a five year run with the Eagles, from 2009 to 2014. He has to be someone known for building teams (not collections of individuals), and has to be someone we trust enough that we can stick with him even when we hit the inevitable tough patches. Mind you, we did have some stability between 2002 and 2005, so it should not just be stability for its own sake, but a deliberate plan to build a team for the 2014 World Cup.

Yes, I said 2014.

We should try to do well in 2010 (if we qualify) and should try to make the semi-finals (if it is at all possible, even via Cinderella Run) but we shouldn’t lose hope in ourselves if it doesn’t happen in 2010. And we should tell any manager that if the Eagles make it into the 2010 World Cup, he has to take an age-balanced squad comprised of veterans who will not make 2014, players in their prime who will be the veterans in 2014, and youngsters who will be in their prime in 2014.

Above all, we should NOT saddle them (players and manager) with unrealistic expectations. Not only could we end up making knee-jerk decisions, based on short-term disappointments, but the pressure could even be counter-productive in terms of the players’ performance on the field.

Dial down the pressure.

The target right now is qualification.