By Uzor Odigbo
As Nigerians continue to react to the ouster of Golden Eaglets from the on-going FIFA U-17 World Cup in Brazil, former Super Eagles Assistant Coach, Joe Erico, has exonerated the team from blame, insisting that poor planning is to blame for the flop.
Five time World Champions last Wednesday lost by 1-3 to European champions, Netherlands in their Group of 16 to end their campaign at the teenage World Cup and Erico believes the system and not the technical crew led by Coach Manu Garba should be blamed for the team’s poor showing in the competition.
According to him, Nigerians should realise that having won the tournament a record five times, other countries will be mapping out new strategies on how to tame the Golden Eaglets, noting that to worsen the situation, there are no functional football academies in the country where quality players would be selected and this leaves the coaches with limited options on team selection which contributed to the poor showing in Brazil.
“I don’t understand why some Nigerians are feeling bad about the Golden Eaglets defeat. They should realise that we’ ve won the competition five times and other countries cannot be watching you winning it all the time.
” Other countries have all gone back to the drawing board and studied our team and probably noted our strong and weak points which contributed to the defeat.
“it’s equally important to understand that our poor system contributed to the defeat. This is a country where we don’t have functional football academies where coaches will shop for young talents and in such hopeless situation, the coach will have little option than to make do with what he have,” lamented the former NEPA FC of Lagos handler.
Erico noted that in the past, the football house appointed coaches for the six geographical zones whose duty it is to comb all the nooks and crannies of the country looking for talented players which has now been jettisoned just as he lamented that zonal grassroots competitions are no more organised on regular basis which is affecting our football development.
“I want to state that there is need for us to go back to the system we were practicing in the past when coaches were appointed from the six geopolitical zones with the mandate to discover talents and organising regular grassroots competitions where talents could be discovered,” concluded the former Super Eagles goalkeeper handler.