Former two-time Super Eagles coach, Chief Adegboye Oningbe has rated Nigerian football low and, despite the country marking 58 years of independence on Monday, the Modakeke high chief believes a lot still has to be done in the sector.
While assessing Nigerian sports on a low, all together, footballlive.ng can report that Onigbinde singled out football as the yardstick to highlight how slow the country has been in making progress.
Onigbinde described victories at the Africa Cup of Nations, Olympics and FIFA U-17 World Cup as flashes in the pan, the import of which he believes has been beclouded by lack of consistency for the nation’s various national teams.
The international football instructor, who took Nigeria to silver at AFCON ’84 in Cote d’Ivoire and was in charge at Korea/Japan 2002 World Cup, opined that lack of adequte plannning is the biggest bane affecting the progress of Nigerian football.
Onigbinde stated further: “The Nigerian sports sector has not grown since Independence. This is because we have not been building it – and what you don’t build cannot grow.
“The country is currently where it is because there has not been a conscious effort to develop things and sports can’t be in isolation. It is a part of a system, which has not been working effectively.
“These are flashes of success and we did not come about them because we carefully planned to achieve them. If we had planned well, we should be reaping from the fruits today.
“There is no particular planned framework that could be said to be responsible for the successes we recorded at those competitions.
“We do well in a competition today and in the next edition, we will not be able to repeat such. In the past, we depended mainly on home-grown talents for competitions.
“But, since we have failed to plan adequately, we have recently been depending on foreign talents and those trained by other countries to do well at competitions.
“That won’t guarantee us success, it will only bring one-time success and after that we go back to what we used to be.”
