Super Eagles Need A Foreign Coach – Kojo Williams

Kojo Williams, a former chairman of the Nigeria Football Association (NFA) has blamed the Super Eagles technical crew headed by Stephen Keshi for the ouster of  the national team from the ongoing FIFA Confederations Cup in Brazil.
The African champions, defeated Tahiti 6-1 in their opening match but went on to suffer consecutive defeats to Uruguay and Spain to exit the tournament in the first round.

Kojo, who had predicted, in a past interview with Sports Vanguard,  that the Super Eagles were going to be exposed at the Confederations Cup, said that he had been vindicated with the event that unfolded in Brazil, adding that Nigerians should expect more doom in subsequent international matches.

“I just think that we were technically bereft and to show how disgraceful and incompetent we are, Keshi, in the days before the match against Tahiti, said that he had no knowledge of Tahiti. He said he had never seen anything of them before. Imagine such a statement from a coach, who lives in America. Couldn’t he have gone online to search for materials on Tahiti? Tahiti were champions of Oceania and Keshi didn’t kinow how to get tapes of their matches?

“His counterpart from Tahiti said he watched clips of the Eagles at the Nations Cup. But our coach said that he did not know anything about Tahiti. It shows that we are not professionals at  all. Coming to Uruguay, Keshi also showed that he knew nothing about the champions of South America, Uruguay, who are an aging side and yet we could not expose them. Our boys had no technical depth, which is a fault of the coaching crew. You saw how Uruguay played and a good coach with the same boys we had could have beaten Uruguay.

“I said it before that we needed sound  technical guys to come in and work with our team, because if   we left the job to the present coaches, then we would get more hammering in the future and that was what happened in Brazil.

Did you see that Spain were relaxed and they still walked past us? Did you see that if they needed more goals to qualify that they would have scored more? I said that we were not going anywhere with that team and some people thought I was wrong. If we are contented being among the best in Africa I don’t have problem with that. We can continue with what we are doing with Keshi but if we want to be among the best in the world then we must help Keshi with a good foreign coach . The problem is that they would not go for the right foreign coach.”

Kojo  laughed off suggestions that the Eagles missed the likes of Emmanuel Emenike and Victor Moses in the attack.

“It is not an acceptable excuse that for missing a player or two your team crumbles. Nobody should tell me that.  This is a nation of more than 160 million people and we must put our house in order.

Look at Spain, they could afford to play with their substitutes and still get the results. I don’t want to hear that we missed Emenike.

That is not an excuse because whether with or without Emenike, the style of football we are playing is the problem, the tactics. We saw how we played and we knew that we could do better”.

On practical steps to take to get the team back in line, Kojo said that the technical crew has to be rejigged, with the addition of technically sound foreign coaches from Europe.

‘’The way we were attacking was negative. We were going forward, then we would pass back. We could not do anything with our attacking  movements. I am not saying that we should do away with Keshi but I am insisting that we need people who can get change our game and get us results”, added Kojo.

Source