Football Nigeria -- Eagles Etcetera

“I don’t have a bench to work right now. In the past one year, Nigeria has used 62 players in our 10 or 11 matches .I don’t have those I can say these are the players to form the core of my team. If I have say six of such players, I can then say these are the core of my team and start to build on it.”                          --- Coach Sunday Oliseh. Fact checking the statement above became necessary as it stuck out. To be sure, Oliseh was not criticizing previous coaches. He was just stating what he believed was fact and it was an answer to a question about who Nigeria’s core players are. However, since then some have questioned why a Nigerian coach should have used 62 players in a single year! We decided to check the facts on this. Below are the results. 1       FACT: Nigeria did in fact use over 60 players in a single year. That is a fact. This occurred in 2014 under Stephen Keshi. ...

After Emmanuel Emenike burst of goals during the 2013 Nations Cup, many began to put him on a pedestal with some of Nigeria's top strikers in recent time. But do the statistics confirm this? How about a similar case for Ikechukwu Uche and for Obafemi Martins? What is not in dispute is that Rashidi Yekini and Thompson Usiyen are the top two strikers ever produced by Nigeria's national team. Though one must acknowledge that Elkanah Onyeali may well have a place in any dispute that may exist about the place of both Yekini and Usiyen in history. Though, Onyeali's place in history may be dimmed since his goal scoring achievements came during Nigeria's lean years and four of his goals arrived in a rather meaningless game against Dahomey (now Benin Republic) on November 28, 1959. If we accept the above position, then what seems arguable is who among Nigeria's strikers, post-Yekini era, could stake the claim for being Nigeria's best. Is it Julius Aghahowa? Yakubu A...