A lot has been said about the Super Eagles squad of players for the two legged World Cup qualifiers playoff games against Ghana in Cape Coast and Abuja on the 25th and 29th of March respectively.
The list which was compiled by the interim coach of the senior national team of Nigeria Austine Eguavoen had 32 names of which seven where placed on standby ahead of the crunch tie.
A look at the list sometimes provides more questions than answers and when Eguavoen was questioned by a group of Nigerian journalists, he also didn’t provide enough clarity on some of the questions raised in relation to the list.
Top of it was when he inferred that the invitation of Ogenyi Onazi who plays in the Saudi Arabia second division for Al-Adalah wasn’t his idea but had to include him to pacify some interest. The interest we later found out was his assistants.
Before making the list of invited players public, Eguavoen asked his assistants to come up with a list of their own and Onazi’s name came up twice and as a show of respect decided to include him but on the standby list.
If that was done out of respect for his assistants, same can’t be said about the inclusion of three players in the team as they were imposed on the coach of the team by president of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) Amaju Pinnick.
Pinnick who was with the coaches during a tour of London made it know to Eguavoen that certain players should be in the list because in his words they are his boys. Eguavoen has his reservations about two of them but had to bow to his demands.
We gathered Eguavoen submitted a list of 28 players to the NFF leaving room for them to add players who are favoured by the president and it is why the list swelled to 32 names. One player in the list was also axed to the standby list with another who is on standby taking his spot in the team.
