Football Nigeria -- Eagles Etcetera

Manager Gernot Rohr has begun to slowly build his team to represent Nigeria during the 2018 World Cup qualifiers. Without the benefit of international friendlies, it appears that Rohr will rely on tactical preparation and not necessarily on a new crop of players to take Nigeria through to the World Cup. Only three of Rohr's current invitees arrive without ever playing for Nigeria's senior team (see Table 1).  With the NFF claiming financial difficulties, Rohr is also unable to engage in a long drawn camp for local players. Instead, he is relying mostly on accomplished internationals based outside the country. However, most of those players cut their teeth playing for either elite or youth clubs in Nigeria. Our focus in this article is to identify each player's last Nigerian club before heading overseas to play professionally. This exercise points to continued importance of home grown players in the process of unearthing talents for Nigeria's national team. The...

Striking options for Nigeria during the upcoming 2018 World Cup qualifying games will be at a premium. In recent times, Nigeria has found it increasingly difficult to distance itself, scoring-wise, from even its weakest opponent ( see Table 1 ). In its last 10 competitive games, Nigeria has scored three goals only once and that was two years ago! This has become, perhaps, Nigeria's most vexing issue. With a World Cup qualifying group of difficult teams, the scoring opportunities will become more scarce. Here, we discuss the options for Nigeria to rectify this problem. Tactical issues Though it is difficult to fully make a claim to tactical choices that Rohr is likely to apply, one may use the Tanzania game to attempt an educated guess. It is likely, that like under Manager Sunday Oliseh's tenure, the set piece will become important in Nigeria's creation of scoring opportunities. Thus, we will discuss the set piece as well as open play scoring options available to Nige...

If you are excited after watching Nigeria’s win over Tanzania by the slimmest of margins, I must say you have a good reason to be. Forget the slim margin. Deeply looking into the match itself, it is clear that the Nigerian team is headed for a good place with a bit of luck added. The win over Tanzania and the recent wins in the European friendlies against Mali and Luxemburg have introduced great expectations. The interest here, however, is in providing my view about the win over Tanzania. My view focuses on examining the team structure, the tactical issues, and then the individual athletes. Team Structure There have been insinuations that the team played in a 4-4-2 formation. Nothing could be further from the truth. The team played from a base 4-3-3 as we had assumed it might be under Gernot Rohr . However, 4-3-3 was just the base. At times, particularly defensively, it morphed into a 4-5-1 but there were difficulties with this as the likes of Victor Moses found it difficult to ...