FEVERPITCH Enyeama, Musa make world’s ‘ most important’ players list
By Mansur Abubakar
Super Eagles captain and goalkeeper Vincent Enyeama alongside teammates Ahmed Musa and Ogenyi Onazi have been named among the 500 most important players in the world by the highly rated World Soccer magazine in its April 2015 publication.
While the recent 100 caps for national team Enyeama was hailed for his immense exploits for club Lille and Eagles, Musa got the recognition for his brilliant brace against Argentina during last year’s FIFA World Cup and for being one of the most important players at CSKA Moscow.
For SS Lazio midfielder, Onazi, his contributions to the upward spiral of his Italian club and also the massive role he played during the Mundial in Brazil didn’t go unnoticed.
In a statement, the publication explained the rationale and criteria behind the list “We have endeavoured to compile a list of world’s most talked about players the most newsworthy players who, by definition, are the most important. We started by drawing up a list of the key players by league, starting with 50 each for the leading leagues in Europe (England, Germany, Spain), 40 for France and Italy,y, between 50 and 25 for middle ranking nking leagues, and ending with between ween five and ten for smaller leagues. ues. We then added players who were important figureses for their national sides and nd in their respective regions.ns.
As expected, otherer players who made de the list include Argentina’s Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Luis Suarez and Wayne Rooney. Like Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy was a child prodigy who dominated youth competitions and appeared on late-night TV to perform golfing stunts. In a newly published New York Times Magazine profile by Charles Siebert, there’s a great anecdote about how high McIlroy set his sights as a kid.
McIlroy’s uncle told Siebert that when McIlroy was 9 years old he wrote Tiger a letter though it is unclear if it ever made it to him saying he better watch his back. No one can recall the note’s precise wording, but its general thrust, as Brian McIlroy, Rory’s uncle and godfather, paraphrased in an email, put Woods on notice: ‘I’m coming to get you. This is the beginning. Watch this space.’
When I met McIlroy, now the world’s No. 1 golfer, in New York in December, I asked him about the letter. ‘A lot of those memories have kind of blurred together,’ he said somewhat sheepishly. ‘But, yeah, it went something like that.’
That’s some pretty great trash talk for a kid who looked like this at the time:
Seventeen years later, McIlroy is the favorite heading into the 2015 Masters, while Tiger has been away from the sport for a month to work on his broken golf game.
McIlroy has not reached the level of dominance Tiger had at his peak, but he has taken over as the top player in the world on the course. He is also making strides to replace Tiger has the face of the sport off the course. He has a deal with Nike golf — which Tiger single-handedly put on the map 20 years ago — rumored to be worth $200 million. Most recently he took over as the face of EA Sports’ golf video game franchise, which Tiger had been for years.