By Daily Sports on April 14, 2020

It has looked exactly like it but the Nigeria Football Federation Chairman Amaju Pinnick recently laboured to explain that the national football body weren’t actively seeking to force out the Super Eagles Technical Adviser Gernot Rohr from his position.

Pinnick said recently in an interview with Channels television: “He (Rohr) has a contract and the contract says he has the right to first refusal. Now we are sending the contract to him and the contract definitely we have maybe one or two provisions but not radically different from what he has and that is the truth.”

If that is where the NFF chairman has stopped all this while regarding the details of the contract negotiations with the Franco-German then it would have been believable the Pinnick and his board are really honest about retaining the services of Rohr who in my opinion and that of majority of Nigerians has had a positive and steadying impact on the Super Eagles ever since he came on board. But we know that the NFF chairman has been going public about the body’s demands for Rohr to sign a new contract and that is, apart from being in itself a poor contract negotiation tactics, smacks of being an attempt to give a dog a bad name in order to hang it.

Tasking Rohr to do more to salvage Nigeria’s local football by inviting and improving more home-based players as the NFF has done fails usually to take cognisance of the fact that the real job of improving our local players lies in the hands of the NFF and the League Management Company (LMC) who must ensure that the best standard practices are maintained in the domestic football scene and that proper planning that would make playing in the league financially satisfactory for players is put in place.

Rohr, in defence of his focus on foreign players, made the point quite finely that he has invited a number of local players who in no time sojourn to Europe to become professionals themselves. Is it his fault that local players don’t want to remain in the league. Even if there is a policy of only using local players for Super Eagles matches, I bet that all the home-based players would still prefer to turn professionals. It’s all about the money, and the money is simply not in the Nigerian domestic league and Rohr can’t really do anything about it.

It seems to me, as it does to many others that there are serious moves behind the scenes by some interests to force Rohr out and install their candidate at the helm of the Super Eagles bench. Doing so will put the new coach in tremendous pressure because he would be taking over from a man who has the support of most Nigerian fans who have been impressed with how Rohr has made the Super Eagles consistently competitive against top sides of world football over the years. Yes, there are those who argue that a local coach won us our last Afcon title in 2013 and that having another local coach now won’t be a bad idea. But we must put as well into context how the Eagles have fumbled and failed to qualify for a tournament as natural to us as the African Nations Cup and how Rohr has finely turned the narrative around positively as far as qualifying for the Afcon is concerned.

Yes, we lost to Argentina at the last World Cup in the first round to exit from the Mundial and were beaten by a last minute magic strike from Algeria’s Riyahd Mahrez in the semi-final of last year’s AFCON and some have held both results as evidence that Rohr lacks the tactical nous to take the Eagles over the line in tough games, however this argument fails to take into consideration where we were coming from before Rohr and that his was and is a young team that would surely make mistakes along the way. But as far as consistency in performing at a high level is concerned, Rohr’s team has shown it can go toe to toe with the best sides of the world as we saw in the Super Eagles 1-1 draw against Brazil last year.

Out of all the national teams in Nigeria, the Super Eagles are the most exciting to watch today. The Under-17 and Under-21 teams as well as our domestic clubs have been a huge mess to watch and it is to his credit that Rohr has overseen a saner and more conducive environment for the Super Eagles, improving team spirit and making merit the most important requirement for featuring for the Eagles.

The Super Eagles are a very promising bunch of going players and any new coach would most likely meet a skeptical bunch of players who have come to enjoy working with Rohr while accepting that their form and not their pocket will get them shirts for the senior national team.

The truth is that the Super Eagles under Rohr is not a broken team and I believe that Pinnick knows it in his heart.  My advice for him then is, to quote this famous proverb: “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”

Source Daily Sports

Posted April 14, 2020

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