By Daily Sports Nigeria on October 31, 2023

Nigerian league winning coach Finidi George is furious after the club's attempt to pour their behind-the-scene failings on his head.

Enyimba head coach Finidi George has finally lifted the lid on issues surrounding the club’s 4-0 aggregate loss to Wydad AC in the African Football League (AFL).

In an exclusive interview with selected journalists, the former Super Eagles winger opened up on some of the internal issues that left the team with no chance against the continent’s biggest clubs in the AFL.

Here are some of the excerpts from the Nigerian football legend.

 

On Player recruitment and squad quality

“At the level of the AFL, you must have a strong squad to stand any chance. We lost our top scorer (Emeka Obioma) and our highest assist provider (Sadiq Abubakar). We also lost so many other top players whose experience would have been needed in the AFL. But nothing was done to replace them right.

“We didn’t have any business losing many of those players, maybe apart from Emeka Obioma who had some big opportunities abroad.

“Sadiq (Abubakar) and Fatai (Abdullahi) were willing to stay, but the club did not show seriousness in keeping them. You don’t lose such players when you are preparing for a competition as big as the AFL.

“The current Enyimba team for the season can only compete in the NPFL and not on the continent. We are not at the level of Wydad. We have to focus on the league. We didn’t replace the players who left adequately.

“Out of 19 new players that were brought in, I had knowledge of only 4 of them. When I saw the quality of the players that were brought, I called Ekwueme the Sporting Director and asked what the target for the season is, he said it is just to stabilize in the league as the focus is to settle down first.

“When you bring in players that have no history in the league and did not even perform well in their previous clubs or anywhere to a top club like Enyimba, how do you compete with a club like Wydad which has national team players and a lot of players that have played in Europe and competed at highest level? We don’t have the squad to compete at such level.”

Issues around player registration

“Ideally, before registering players for any competition, the coaches must be consulted to submit the list. But that wasn’t the case here. For whatever flimsy reason, we were not consulted and they did the registration themselves. As a result, some of the players we would have needed were not registered. It was much later that the sporting director just sent us the list of players that they had already registered.

“After the first leg, they dropped some players from travelling for the second leg in Casablanca, claiming that they couldn’t get them visas. We had to protest it strongly before it was rectified. We later found out that there was more to it.

“Can you imagine that we went for such a game without the goalkeeping and fitness coaches? Myself and Yema were the only coaches that travelled for that game. That is very strange to me.

“Everyone has to put the interest of the club first because until this is done, we would only be joking.”

Source Opera News

Posted October 31, 2023

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