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As captain of the Super Eagles, Stephen Keshi was known as the ‘Big Boss’ for his no-nosense style on and off the pitch.

Years later when he became coach of the Hawks, Togo’s national football team, he retained something of that attitude, a fact that helped him qualify the West African country for its first ever World cup in 2006.

He failed, however, to lead the squad to the World Cup after falling out with officials of the Togolese Football Federation (TFF).

One year later, in February 2007, the TFF re-engaged Keshi for a friendly against Cameroon, but the questions concerning his dismissal continued to linger. The rumours at that time were that he (Keshi) wanted to manage the career of Nigerian-born Togolese star, Emmanuel Adebayor but because the former Arsenal player did not agree to the proposal, Keshi dropped him to the bench.

His second stint with the Togolese squad proved to be short-lived with the former Nigerian international showing up in Mali to lead the country to the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations in Angola.

Keshi, who was laid off by Mali after the 2010 Nations Cup in Angola, also lost out to Samson Siasia, in the race to become the coach of the Super Eagles in November.

Third missionary journey

After losing out to Siasia, Keshi weighed his options and last Tuesday, March 22, he made a dramatic return to the job he had handled and lost twice. TFF President, Gabriel Ameyi called a press conference in Lome to reveal that a temporary arrangement had been reached with Keshi to lead the team once again.

He has assigned him the job of leading the Hawks to Blantyre for yesterday’s 2012 African Cup of Nations Cup qualifier against Malawi.

So what is different now?

Keshi is now back in his third stint as Togo coach. He has successfully weathered the storms of the accusations about his wanting to manage Adebayor. With the passage of time, the world has come to know that Adebayor is not an easy player to manage as he has shown first at Arsenal and then at Manchester City.

Whether his erratic behaviour will be curbed by the ‘Special One’, Jose Mourinho, at Real Madrid remains to be seen.

Keshi was welcomed heartily by Togolese football fans at the team’s first training session on Tuesday where he smiled and waved to fans who had come to watch the exercise.

But there could be a cog in the wheel with the naming of Emmanuel Adebayor in the list of 22 players; the former African Player of the year striker had ostensibly retired from the national team last year after the Togolese bus was attacked in Cabinda, shortly before the Nations Cup in Angola leading to the death of three persons.

Instability in Togo football

Togo’s football administration is one that can be said to be worse than their neighbour’s, Nigeria’s. The tiny West African country has a penchant for hiring and firing coaches and the football community surely must be wondering why Keshi returned after previous emabarrassments.

Since February 2009, Togo has had four coaches- Otto Pfister, hired after Keshi’s sack also quit the team over player bonuses before a ball had been kicked in Germany in 2006 but returned to the team for the opening 1-2 loss to South Korea.

Frenchman Patrice Neveu was expected to replace German Otto Pfister as the coach of the Hawks last month but his appointment was blocked by the government. Neveu was appointed by Gnassingbe Eyadema but when the son of the former Togolese president was voted out of office, Tata Avlessi, the TFF President became reluctant to endorse an appointment packaged by the previous regime. Thierry Froger resigned to take charge of French side Nimes earlier this month.

The national team players have also staged protests at various times over the World Cup bonuses of about $200,000 each, with additional payments.

The future of Keshi and Togo interwoven

As a football player, Keshi achieved many feats – the first Nigerian player to play in the Belgian league and ensured that the lexicon; foreign-based became entrenched in football journalism in the country. He has also become the first Nigerian coach to manage the affairs of three national teams – Nigeria, as assistant to Shuaibu Amodu, as coach of Togo and then Mali. Now, he has thrust himself back into the limelight perhaps to prove naysayers wrong.

If he can lift the Hawks to the heights of 2005 and 2006, then maybe Keshi will have proven beyond any doubt that he has the capability to coach at the highest level.

When the junior tennis national team boards the plane to Botswana tomorrow, they will be going to the Southern African country to once again prove to the rest of Africa that Nigeria is rising again in the game.

Twenty years ago, Nigeria sat comfortably at the pinnacle of tennis on the continent but things went awry.

Now it seems that the ‘giant’ of Africa is rising again to take up her position as the leader in the sport. The team of six players and two coaches has four male and two female players who have vowed that they will be giving an early Easter present to Nigerians.

Sarah Adegoke, who will play in the 14 and under category said at their practice venue in Lagos on Thursday that:

“We have to make sure that we come out tops in Botswana; we are definitely going to surprise a lot of people.

The Ibadan-based player also added that the tours of Ghana and Togo have prepared her for the trip to Botswana.

“In Ghana, we showed the stuff we were made of but now even though the games will be harder and tougher, we are prepared for the challenges ahead.” She also spoke on her West African nemesis, Ghanaian, Elizabeth Archimpong, who defeated her in the finals of the Ghana competition.

“I do not know what happens to me when I meet Elizabeth – it just seems that I forget my game and get all jittery and nervous and that was what happened in Winneba.”

This view was corroborated by her coach, Mohammed Ubale, who said he has been working on mental toughness for his young players.

“We have had times in the past when the players have frozen on the big stage but that has to do with tour experience and the team has some tours under their belt now. Going for more competitions is the only way to prepare these kids – there is no other way.”

The team, after their triumph in Ghana had gone on a two-week programme to Togo where the Nigerian team also came out tops, a development that helped this team prepare very well for their Botswana expedition.

Tough task

Bulus Husseini, a former national player who has had coaching stints in the United States of America said the coach has a lot of work to prepare the team for the task ahead. He says the South Africans and the North Africans always have a mental toughness about them that the Nigerians must copy:

“The coach should work on the players’ fitness, skills, tactical awareness, perseverance, mental toughness and psychological fitness” and he also added that “the Nigeria Tennis Federation (NTF) needs to work much harder by introducing a lot of junior tournaments” like the NNPC/Chevron Junior Masters tournament which ends today (Sunday) which at the moment are almost non-existent, Husseini said.

He continued: “The NTF should have regular meetings and many junior and senior tournaments should be introduced to offer the players much exposure. Presently we have about four senior and one junior functional tournaments in our yearly calendar; these are grossly inadequate compared to the situation three decades ago”, Husseini said.

After the championship

Most of the players that will be representing the country have had their future brightened by plans designed to help achieve the goal of producing tennis players who will improve to later on play on the ATP and WTA circuits.

Samuel Omoile, who is one of the players representing the country in Botswana, is on his way to the famed Sanchez Vicario tennis academy in Barcelona, on account of the NNPC/Chevron initiative. He has been admitted for a three-year programme and that will culminate with him turning pro in 2014.

“I have to make sure that this opportunity does not pass me by. I want to be one of the best players in the world like Roger Federer,” Omoile said.

For him to get that dream on the road, he must first beat the best juniors that other African countries have to offer and that quest will start on Tuesday in Gaborone.

The Nigerian team was camped in Lagos and the male players used the 12th NNPC/Chevron tournament to prepare adequately for Botswana. The two girls – Sarah Adegoke and Afolarin Akosile trained with their male counterparts for the one week that they were in Lagos. The team is billed to depart for Gaborone, Botswana by 11pm, Sunday night aboard South Africa Airways.

The tournament had to be moved to Botswana from Egypt where it was originally slated on account of the political upheaval that swept the country in February. The competition will end on April 8, 2011.

In the course of discharging my duties as a sports journalist, I have come across people who have bluntly accused sports journalists of being responsible for the rot in the Nigerian sports sector.

I have often defended my colleagues and I, arguing that the charge is akin to holding political reporters responsible for bad leadership in the country.

After careful review of the situation, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that we are more than culpable. As journalists we are expected not only to faithfully report on society but to go a step further to hold those who activities we reflect in our media and whose activities impinge one way or another on the health of society, accountable.

That is where we have been remiss as sports journalists. That the different sports in Nigeria particularly key ones like football, boxing, athletics and basketball, which in decades past thrust Nigeria into global limelight, have atrophied right before our eyes makes us as guilty as the sports administrators who have through acts of omission or commission, run them down.

As watchdogs, we have not asked the hard questions but have preferred to cuddle the army of misfits and charlatans who have superintended our sports. We accept at face value the lies and half-truths peddled by these administrators instead of digging deep to unearth the truth.

It is for this reason that we find individuals not particularly distinguished either by sharp intellect or sound moral judgment building empires and carving out fiefdoms while the sports entrusted to them decays.

How else do we explain the matter of Habu Gumel and volleyball? How do you explain the fact that the man has spent the whole of eighteen years as President of the Nigerian Volleyball Federation and in the intervening period has been a member of the International Volleyball federation and the sport is dead in this country?

The only plausible explanation is because as journalists, we let him get away with it. Have we engaged him enough to tell Nigerians while he should continue in that position when his nearly two decades tour of duty has not been meaningful? Eighteen years in the life of an individual is a long time, long enough for him to record ground-breaking achievements. If there had been a modicum of seriousness on the part of Gumel, would Nigerian volleyball not have appropriated a spot in the commanding heights of the sport globally?

Anyway, this piece is not about Gumel.

It is about how we can pull sports writing from the mud into which our indifference and sometimes criminality, plunges it daily.

Re-inventing ourselves

We have come to the point where we must look ourselves in the eye and tell ourselves the truth and that truth as we are wont to say here in Nigeria is bitter. And it is that sports journalism is going to the dogs; it is getting alarmingly pedestrian with a new generation of practitioners who have neither the inclination nor the competence to faithfully discharge their duties. The situation in our profession has become like the situation in the banking industry where economic recession forced jobless graduates to seek to become bankers with a good many of them managing to squeeze themselves into banks and ultimately helping in the collapse of some of them.

While it is evident that there is still a crop of decent and professionally minded sports writers who are still able to challenge the rabid status quo with a view to bringing about a change in the way sports is run in this country, we have in the main, mercenaries and journeymen whose stock-in-trade is to massage the bloated egos of our for the most part, vacuous and mercantilist sports administrators. Given this, it is not surprising to see the clear lack of will on the part of most of us to see for instance, the crisis in Nigerian football come to an end.

While a good many of us like to reminisce about the good old days of Sunday Dankaro, Mahmoud Kadiri and Patrick Okpomo in football administration for instance, few are willing to exert the mental energy required to make the present superintendents of Nigerian football administer the game like these gentlemen mentioned, failing which we make things unbearable for them.

Looking at the profession today, it is hard to imagine that it produced brilliant minds like Fabio Olanipekun, Walter Oyatogun, Yinka Craig, Sunny Ojeagbase, Frank Ilaboya, Tayo Balogun, Chris Eseka, Robert Ndabai, Mitchell Obi,

Ejiro Omonode, Kunle Solaja, Ikeddy Isiguzo, Patrick Odili, Segun Adenuga to name a few of them.

We desperately need to do some soul searching; we need to re-invent ourselves for it is only by doing so that we can put ourselves in the position to help lift Nigerian sports from the morass into which greed and incompetence has plunged it by pointing the way forward through informed objective commentaries and analysis. To do otherwise would be to sentence sports to certain death.

A year ago, girls at Ajigbeda Girls Secondary School in Lagos State knew next to nothing about the game of basketball and getting a chance to represent the state at a national championship was the last thing on their minds.

All that has changed.

Ajigbeda Girls Secondary School won the recently held finals of the Milo Basketball Championships for Lagos State and thus secured the ticket to represent the state at the next stage of the tourney, which is the Western Conference scheduled to come up in June at Ibadan.

For the young girls who say they are ready to fly the state’s flag high at the basketball event, it is all thanks to the Hope4Girls foundation.

“I feel very happy and grateful to the coaches and Hope 4Girls for all their support” a member of the team disclosed.

Akiode’s project

A brain child of former Nigerian basketball player, Mobolaji Akiode, ‘Hope 4 Girls’ is dedicated to the increased participation and empowerment of disadvantaged young African women in sports and education. Because of the initiative and the desire to help the coming generation of women, Akiode said she quit her accounting job at American Cable sports company, ESPN and returned to Nigeria to set up the basketball camp to help young girls in the country. She had been a member of the 2004 Nigerian Olympic basketball team.

“This is such a great achievement mainly because a year ago this school didn’t even have a basketball team and with just a little support from us the girls really showed how much they love basketball and hope4girls!,” Akiode said.

The former WNBA star added:

“Although we would have had more schools enter, our academy currently works with eight schools. It’s just unfortunate those games masters are not as dedicated as we are and are holding the girls back. My motto has always been giving these children an opportunity to explore their creativity and you will see greatness in them.

“As for me I’m just so proud of them and their hard work, they make me feel like I should do more and support more. To me they are champions and anything that happens in the regional is icing on the cake,” she added.

Making a champion

Iyabo Yusuf, lead camp administrator of the foundation further explained the journey at making the new champions.

“Hope4girls introduced basketball to eight girls secondary schools in District IV of Lagos State Educational Board in March 2010 during the Princess Classic Camp and Ajigbeda Girls Secondary School happens to be one of the schools,” she said.

“The students of these said schools have never played basketball before, and after the camp, about 200 girls were enrolled into the Princess Academy from the eight schools”.

As part of Hope4Girls’ plan to empower young Nigerian girls through sports and education, the organisation reduced the 200 girls to 60 girls using their academic performances and commitment to the game as part of the criteria for the screening. Sixteen girls from Ajigbeda Girls Secondary School scaled the screening and their performance in the Hope4Girls academy has been remarkable.

Other schools in the academy include; Ideal, New Era, Wesley, Gbaja, Itolo, Clegg and Surulere Girls Secondary Schools.

Iyabo noted that emerging as champions wasn’t a stroll in pack the Ajigbeda Girls.

“The challenges were posed mostly (by the) District VI representative, which is Ilupeju Grammar school; this school has been representing Lagos State in the Western Conference for the last three years with a bunch of experienced players compared to the girls that started the game a year ago. But with the help of God and hard work of our coaches, we were able to defeat Ilupeju in the final 15-10 points”.

Looking ahead

Already looking ahead, Iyabo said the new goal is making it to the next stage of the championship, which is the Western Conference scheduled to come up in June at Ibadan, Oyo State.

“We are in the same zone with Delta, Oyo, Ogun, Ondo, Ekiti, Kogi and Osun States.

Looking at the vast experience of Oyo and Delta in the game, we are working out a strategy on how to pick a ticket to the national level of the championship,” she said.

For Iyabo, the outstanding player is the captain of the team, Saidat Ali, 14, of Senior Secondary (SS)2. She led the team to victory with her last minute 3 pointer.

Aside the latest feat by the foundation the body had last year also helped two girls secure scholarships to study in the United States amongst other projects it is presently executing.

At the moment, Akiode, is he reliving her experiences as a blogger with ESPN where she talks about experiences like the one she is currently having at the National Youth Service Camp in Abuja.

“I created Hope4Girls to try to better the lives of underprivileged girls. The game of basketball was great to me, and I want to share with others the opportunities it gave me. Of course, I’m not the first athlete to try to inspire others. [But] I want Hope4Girls to have the same impact as many other conscientious charities by athletes, which tackle poor education, address social inequalities and inspire youth.

“Trying to run H4G hasn’t been easy. If you think getting support for girls’ sports is difficult in America, you can’t even imagine the bigger obstacles in trying it in Nigeria. But as the great Muhammad Ali would say, “Impossible is nothing!”

The Super Eagles will tackle the Ethiopian national football team – the Walya Antelopes, in a 2012 Africa Cup of Nations qualifier inside the main bowl of the National Stadium in Abuja with only one thought on their mind – victory!

In what will be Samson Siasia’s first official match, not just a victory will do for his boys tonight against the East Africans, they need to secure a wide-margin victory in order to reduce the advantage currently held by Group B leaders, Guinea, who currently have six points, three points ahead of the Super Eagles.

The Guineans also enjoy a comfortable plus-four goals difference over the Eagles, who only have plus-one following the 1-0 loss they suffered at the hands of the Guineans back in October last year.

Guinea will also be in action today against Madagascar in Antananarivo but if the poor run of form of the Madagascans since the start of the qualifiers is anything to go by, then the Guineans should emerge from this game with at least a point.

A win is equally possible for the Guineans; after all, they will be taking on a Madagascan side that has lost all their Group B matches to date, including a 1-0 loss to Ethiopia last October in Antananarivo.

But a lot has happened to the islanders since suffering back to back losses to Nigeria (2-0) and Ethiopia as there has been a change in coaching personnel with Frenchman Jean-Paul Rabier making way for local coach Maurice Mosa who will also make his competitive debut today.

That will be the scenario today for the Eagles as they seek to win and win-over the fans.

Siasia though has another agenda – the coach will seek to prove that the people’s mandate was not mis-placed.

Arguably one of the best Nigerian coaches of his generation, Siasia has the arduous task of changing the fortunes of a side that has become a shadow of its once illustrious past for the better; the Super Eagles no longer commands the respect of other teams on the African continent and in the world.

Intense pressure

The match takes on added significance considering the fact that only one team from Group B is guaranteed automatic qualification to next year’s Africa Cup of Nations to be co-hosted by Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. And with three rounds of matches to go after tonight’s game, Siasia is no doubt under immense pressure to grab a win over the Ethiopians.

“The man must know that he has to win. I’m sure he sees the log and knows that Guinea is ahead of us,” said Ademola Olajire, the media officer of the Nigeria Football Federation. “I’m sure he knows that if we do not win this match we may not play at the Africa Cup of Nations next year.

“I’m also sure as he lives his life daily; he meets people and gets phone calls from friends to want him to know what is at stake. All that can put pressure on a person so I know he is under some pressure but it is not coming from us.”

The history between both sides backs the Super Eagles to emerge victorious at the end of tonight’s game as they have only lost once to the East Africans in four previous meetings.

That loss (1-0) came in 1993 in Addis Ababa but the Super Eagles retaliated in grand style by securing an overwhelming 6-0 victory over the Ethiopians in Lagos to qualify for the 1994 Africa Cup of Nations in Tunisia.

The Super Eagles went on to win the Tunisia ‘94 Africa Cup of Nations with Siasia playing an integral role in that side’s all-conquering route to the cup.

Siasia said he dreams of becoming the first Nigerian coach to lead the Super Eagles to an Africa Nations Cup title but readily admitted that he will first need to secure qualification ahead of the Guineans beginning with victory in tonight’s tie against the Walya Antelopes.

“We have to first secure qualification before we can start thinking of winning the trophy,” he said. “And to be sure of that we have to win all our games starting with this one. Everyone in the team is aware of that (and) will be doing their best to make it come to pass.”

Siasia will, however, have to make-do without the services of the duo of Osaze Odemwingie and Obafemi Martins who are currently nursing injuries.