It was a very interesting day in the Super Eagles hotel yesterday morning. The Nigerian camp was becoming too calm and too quiet. The elements must have thought it is necessary to shake it up a bit, as some people think the Nigerian does best in an environment of chaos and crisis, unfortunately. The records actually indicate that Nigerian players do not thrive in calm weather. The best confirmation is a look at the most successful team in Nigeria’s history. What drove the team? No one understood the psychology of the Nigerian team better than Clemens Westerhof, the Dutch tactician of the early 1990s in Nigerian football.
He told me what he did.
After he made his crazy ‘discovery’, he effectively deployed a little crisis as a tool for getting Nigerians players to be ‘angry’ by denying them their hard-earned money and then challenging them to win for more. It worked until he overstretched his luck beyond its elastic limit against Italy at USA ’94. That day in the city of Boston, it fell apart and backfired. The team lost disastrously.
In Alexandria, yesterday, the elements must have breathed life into Westerhof’s theorem again. If not, where did the issue of non-payment of a single match bonus come from on the eve of the biggest match at the group stage, to disrupt the tranquility of the team when these same players that had remained patient and understanding without demanding or receiving even one single dime since camping began over 3 weeks ago? Yesterday, the players not only refused to attend the pre-match press conference yesterday morning, but they also threatened not to go for their last training session should they not be paid immediately.
All hell threatened to break loose. It was a ‘good’ omen (according to Westerhof’s theorem) that the team’s preparation was disrupted in order to stir the essential crisis to ‘enrage’ the Eagles and fire them to victory! It is a crazy theory! As the news flashed around the world, the NFF leadership embarked on immediate damage control. Within a few hours, it was all settled. The players were reassured; they went for their final training session and returned all smiles. It is quite possible that the players have started to receive alerts on their phones because the calm and happy atmosphere has returned, with Samuel Kalu bubbling with life and celebrating his full return to action after completing the full session of training. The score between Nigeria and Guinea will be finally settled today. The two teams do not play against each other often enough, but any time they met it was fireworks. So, Africa is in for a super football treat this evening.
By the way, I shall be anchoring the television coverage of the match on NTA, Africa’s largest television network. So, watch out and don’t miss it.
Segun Odegbami
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