Nigeria Content Online

Edin Dzeko’s
chances of joining Premier League title chasers Manchester City have
been boosted with a ringing endorsement from City’s manager Roberto
Mancini.

The 24-year-old
Bosnia striker is one of the Bundesliga’s most prolific scorers and
City are reported to be in negotiations to sign him from VfL Wolfsburg
once the transfer window opens on Saturday.

“We have the chance
to win the league this year and the decisive factor could be Edin
Dzeko,” Italian Mancini told the Daily Mail.

“This player can
decide titles and that is why we want him.” City, who are level on
points with Manchester United at the top of the table, albeit having
played two more games, have relied heavily on the goals of Carlos Tevez.

With Emmanuel
Adebayor and Roque Santa Cruz both out of favour with Mancini and Mario
Balotelli yet to settle despite his hat-trick in the 4-0 win over Aston
Villa on Tuesday, Dzeko’s goal scoring record looks enticing.

Dzeko was
Bundesliga top scorer with 22 goals last season and second top scorer
the season in 2008/9 with 26, when Wolfsburg won the title.

He has scored 10 league goals in the first half of this season, even though Wolfsburg are struggling in 13th place.

Wolfsburg’s English manager Steve McClaren said recently that it could be hard for the club to keep hold of Dzeko.

“We hope that Edin
stays because he is a world class striker, but we are in the business
of football and nothing is 100 percent certain,” he said. “We will have
to see what happens.”

Wolfsburg have declined to comment on the speculation surrounding the player.

Reuters

Football fans will get another peak into the drama that is playing out in the English Premier League tomorrow.

The first five
teams on the table are separated by five points and the last eight
teams on the log are also separated by five points. So two wins on the
trot can take a team from relegation to mid-table and a loss of two
straight matches at the top will have the same consequence.

In the top match of the day, West Bromwich Albion will host league leaders Manchester United.

West Brom have lost
their last three league matches and have plunged down the table to 14th
while United, who, according to Alex Ferguson, were ‘robbed’ of victory
at St. Andrews are at the top of the table with a game in hand. To
maintain this momentum, United need to nix the three points but Albion
also need a victory to continue the good work of Roberto Di Matteo.

Nigerian striker,
Osaze Odemwingie missed a glut of scoring chances against Bolton and
the six-goal hero was brunt of negative comments from fans. But Di
Matteo, has defended the striker saying, “Peter had two fantastic
chances and it’s quite unusual for him (to miss them). He’s quite
composed in front of goal and he usually scores. But that will come.
Apart from the chances, he had a good game. If he scored a goal or two
then we would be talking in different terms. He’ll be okay.”

The former Chelsea player will be doing his former team a great favour if he can stop the United juggernaut.

With their loss at
home to Blackburn, the Baggies have not won in three matches and are
being steadily dragged into the relegation zone. But Odemwingie has
sounded a rallying call to his team mates to brace up for the fight
ahead. “The coach said we need to be more clinical but my big worry
will be when we don’t have chances and lose,” he said on the club’s
website.

“Against Bolton we
had five good chances to score – let’s call it a bad day for us. It was
disappointing as I want our fans to go home with a smile. We played
very well; even our manager was satisfied with the performance, just
not the finishing.”

United are strong defensively

For West Brom to
record a victory tomorrow, the finishing definitely has to improve as
United boast of two defenders in Rio Ferdinand and Captain Nemanja
Vidic, who do not give any quarter. And Ferdinand is now looking ahead
to Saturday’s encounter to make amends for the two points United
dropped at Birmingham. “We should have got the three points at
Birmingham but we’ll be looking to the next game to make things right,”
Ferdinand said on United TV.

“I thought, on the
whole, we deserved to win at St Andrew’s. But you want to shut games
out like that and we didn’t manage to do it. It was a kick in the teeth
to concede the equaliser so late on.”

Ferdinand however added that the inability to call those kind of games is what makes the league very interesting.

“It’s what makes
the Premier League such a great league to play in. You get a different
set of tasks in front of you each week and you have to deal with them.”

Dealing with the
Albion players and crowd is what United have to do on Saturday as they
travel to a team that held them 2-2 at Old Trafford courtesy of a
goalkeeping howler from Edwin Van Der Saar. Albion have not won against
the Red Devils since March 1984 when Cyrille Regis and Steve Mackenzie
scored in a 2-0 win at the Hawthorns.

Other matches

Liverpool have
fallen again to the malaise of early season and Roy Hodgson knows that
his job is on the line with the Wednesday loss to bottom of the table,
Wolves. Wolves will now face West Ham with the loser starting the New
Year at the bottom of the league.

Tottenham will also love to move back to fourth place on the table with victory over Fulham.

And Manchester City could go top of the table if they beat an
unpredictable Blackpool team at the City of Manchester Stadium and
United slip up at the Hawthorns.

Harrison Jalla,
President of the National Association of Nigerian Footballers (NANF)
has described the annulment of Davidson Owumi’s election as Chairman of
the Nigeria Premier League as illegal. The Nigeria Football Federation
had annulled the election yesterday.

But according to Jalla, only the congress of the NPL that approved Owumi’s election could annul the election and not the NFF.

“The NFF never
elected Owumi nor were they part of the process that brought him in so
it is wrong for them to just come around and say that they are
annulling an election they were not a party to,” he said.

“It is a big joke;
a sad development and unacceptable. The NFF does not have the power to
do that; the NPL is an entity, it has its own congress and board and if
those organs feel dissatisfied with the election they can go ahead to
remove Owumi and not the NFF executive committee.”

Jalla had been locked in a battle with the current board of the NFF over their legality but later settled out of court.

He concluded that the players’ union will continue to recognise Owumi as league boss.

The annulment

The NFF had on
Wednesday asked Owumi to vacate his seat as the NPL boss and deputy,
Shehu Gusau to run the affairs of the league pending the 14 days in
which fresh polls would be conducted.

The NFF ruled that it would uphold the Ibidapo Obe committee report, which had faulted Owumi’s emergence as the NPL boss.

On his own part,
the major rival of Owumi, Rumson Baribote has stated that he would only
accept the result of the soon to be conducted polls only if “due
process” is followed.

According to the
former Chairman of Bayelsa United, the deposed chairman should not be
allowed to contest the election again because he was never eligible to
contest.

Owumi beat Baribote to the position in an election conducted on May
20 but the former boss of Bayelsa United challenged the results of the
polls, claiming that Owumi was ineligible to contest. The NPL election
Appeals Committee upheld the results of the polls, but Ayo Ibidapo-Ope,
an independent arbitrator appointed by the NFF ruled in favour of
annulling the elections.

For the National
Sports Commission (NSC) to work as effectively as possible, there is
the need to overhaul it completely, says Dan Ngerem, former president
of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria.

Ngerem, speaking
about the state of sports in the last decade, said the chairman of the
commission should not be a political appointee.

“The NSC structure
itself is faulty. It should have a board and a chairman who hold office
for a fixed term unlike the situation we have now that the ministers
just come and go at any time”.

He also called on
the National Assembly to quickly pass the NSC Act so as to make the NSC
a legal entity appropriating money for a body that is not known to law
is unacceptable. The NSC must be backed by law”.

Public-private partnership

The former AFN president said there is need to make sports administration a partnership between the public and private sector.

“Government should
allow sports to thrive on its own. It is misleading and mischievous for
people to think that sports will die in Nigeria without government
funding. A few years ago we had a public -private partnership
arrangement, that’s talking about the Team Nigeria.

They killed that
programme and did not put any replacement in its place. We must go back
to it. The private sector is willing to inject money into sports but is
being held back by the lack of accountability and transparency of our
sports administrators,” Ngerem said.

On Nigeria’s declining fortunes in sports, Ngerem said one of the ways of arresting the slide is by returning to the grassroots.

“We must go back to school sports where values of discipline and
commitment would be inculcated in our children at an early age. This
will help them grow up to become thoroughbred professionals who will do
what is required to put Nigeria at the forefront of the global sporting
community,” he said.

Kenyan Olympic
Marathon champion, Samuel Wanjiru, was charged in court on Thursday
with threatening to kill his wife and illegal possession of an AK-47
assault rifle.

Wanjiru, the first
Kenyan to win the Olympic gold in the marathon, also faced two other
counts of threatening to kill his watchman and assaulting him.

The athlete, who
has also won the Chicago Marathon and London Marathon, was accused of
committing the crimes at his home in Nyahururu, a town in the Rift
Valley, some 150 km (94 miles) northwest of the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

The prosecution said Wanjiru threatened to kill his wife Teresiah Njeri using the rifle following a confrontation.

Through his lawyer
Wahome Ndegwa, Wanjiru denied all the charges, and was released on bail
until his case returns to court early next year.

Wanjiru defied the heat of Beijing two years ago to triumph in an Olympic record time at the games held in China.

Former German
number one Nicolas Kiefer announced his retirement from tennis on
Thursday, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family.

The 33-year-old won
a men’s doubles silver medal at the 2004 Olympics and clinched the last
of his six ATP titles in 2000, the year in which he achieved a
career-high world ranking of four.

“At the start of
the New Year, you set yourself targets and I’ve achieved mine on Aug 11
of the year which is ending,” Kiefer said on his website
(nicolaskiefer.de).

“With the birth of
our daughter Mabelle Emilienne, my greatest wish has been fulfilled.
From now on, I would like to accompany and shape this new life.

“Therefore, after
deep thought, I’ve decided to end my career as a tennis professional.”
Kiefer looked on course to follow in the footsteps of six-times grand
slam champion Boris Becker when he won the junior titles at the
Australian and U.S. Opens in 1995.

But like many
promising youngsters, he struggled to translate that success on the
main tour and never managed to reach a final of a grand slam.

After reaching the Toronto Masters final in 2008, Kiefer struggled
to shake off a wrist injury and as a result his ranking nosedived to
722nd in the world.