Nigeria, Egypt in dicey duel for Olympic ticket at Senegal 2015 Under-23 AFCON News

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Nigeria, Egypt in dicey duel for Olympic ticket at Senegal 2015 Under-23 AFCON

By Daily Sports on December 2, 2015

It won’t be an easy task today as Nigeria’s U-23 Eagles, Dream team VI, trade tackles with the Young Pharaohs of Egypt in the ongoing Senegal 2015 Under-23 AFCON, which will produce the continent’s representatives at the Rio 2016 Olympics Games football competition. No doubt, the two sides on parade today are big names in the continent’s football scene and they will go all out for each other’s throat to see who gets the bigger pound of flesh.

Nigeria is going into this battle of wits and brawn with the three points garnered from Sunday evening’s 3-2 victory over hard-fighting Mali while Egypt has only a point from the 1-1 draw it got from her encounter against Algeria. The stage is already set and the fittest would laugh last. It is most likely that the game would be won and lost on the bench. The team whose technical crew puts on its thinking superbly would over-run the other on slim margin of victory, though.

Reports coming out from the camp of Nigeria indicate that both the players and the officials are determined not to allow what happened in the second stanza against Mali in their first match to repeat itself. Coach Samson Siasia has acknowledged that Nigeria was lucky against Mali and has ruled out a repeat of that scary prospect where his lads allowed their opponents to put them under intense pressure in the second stanza of the game.

It was learnt that Siasia and his crew have been strategising on how to hold the hard-fighting Young Pharaohs in the game that means much for the former Olympic champions. The Nigerians have been talking to themselves on the need to face the North Africans squarely and to go on rampage in a bid to maintain the leadership of the group and brighten their chances of picking the group’s sole ticket.

On the other hand, the Young Pharaohs under the tutelage of Ahly coach Hossam El-Badry are leaving no stone unturned for this make-or-break clash of the titans. The North Africans, it was gathered, have vowed to pick the maximum points at stake in order to keep their hope of participating in the Rio 2016 Olympics Games football event alive.

Head or tail, you don’t need bookmakers to predict that it won’t be tea party but fireworks all the way from the time the match gets under at 7pm Nigerian time, till the last blast of the referee’s whistle.

•Photo shows Coach Siasia.

Source Daily Sports

Posted December 2, 2015