My Coach For The Super Eagles
IDO not like to bring up the issue of coaches, because we forget easily. Let us talk about a few foreign coaches since Clemens Westerhof, my friend, the acclaimed best coach in Nigeria’s history, was engaged to coach the national team in 1989.
Who was Clemens in the world of coaching when he was hired? Was he a world - class coach? What club or country of renown did he coach? What trophies of substance did he win?
The truth is that he was a nobody. Nobody knew him. How he was hired will make Jose Paseiro’s case look very good.
Clemens started rather poorly but ended after five years on a glorious note. Throughout that period, he enjoyed uncommon privileges, access to power and resources arranged by the interest that brought him into the system.
By 1994, at the end of the USA World Cup, so sour was his relationship with some players, media, and even leadership of the football association that he abandoned the job and did not even bother to return to Nigeria. Thus ended his era.
Then, it was widely reported that he was not even the brain behind the success of the team on the field of play. A section of the media led public opinion in questioning his technical competence, crediting his success to his trainer/ assistant, Jo Bonfrere.
That’s how, supported by some media, a trainer was elevated to national coach of Nigeria, in total betrayal of trust unknown in football at that level.
Jo Bonfrere was a ‘ nobody’ as well in getting that job. He had no worldclass credentials. Yet, he took a team brimming with exceptionally talented footballers to Atlanta ’ 96 and returned with an Olympic Gold medal. Like Westerhof before him, the Super Eagles were his launch pad to his coaching success and any credible credentials.
Incidentally, he too soon fell out with the authorities, and the cycle of foreign coaches continued intermittently after that, with occasional punctuations by Nigerian coaches for brief
periods, until another foreign coach was hired to take the team to the 1998 World Cup.
Bora Milutinovic was the first ‘ world- class’ coach to be hired by Nigeria. He was so ‘ good’ that he was the only coach in the world at the time to have taken four national teams ( none was African) to the World Cup. His tenure as Nigeria’s national team coach may probably be the worst in Nigeria’s history. He did not even return to Nigeria from his disastrous outing at France ’ 98. That much said for a ‘ worldclass’ coach.