Former Super Eagles forward Daniel Amokachi has decried the rate of deterioration in the country’s tradition of football.
The 49 years old stated that Nigeria’s over-dependence on players with dual citizenship who have little or no idea about the nation’s culture of football has affected the development of football in the country.
The Bull as he was fondly called during his active days in football, stressed that Victor Osimhen who knows what it takes to put on a Nigeria jersey fought tirelessly to ensure the Super Eagles feature in Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup by November.
Amokachi noted that there is every possibility that players with dual citizenship would not make the squad of their birth country and resort to playing for Nigeria, The Trumpet gathered
According to SuperSport, he said: “Quality-wise we can’t take it away from Nigeria. Every day Nigeria is blessed with one immigrant player who is playing out there and he’ll always come up and say I turned down my birth country, I want to play for Nigeria when their country of birth never looked for them. They won’t even make their birth nation squads.”
Disappointed by the deviation of the country’s football tradition from its developmental structure that was set in place over 20 years ago, Amokachi accorded credit to Stephen Keshi for sticking to it which resulted in the nation winning the 2013 Afcon title.
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He said: “Unfortunately for us Nigeria, we’ve thrown away our developmental structure which we had that made us win the 1996 Olympics gold medal, that made that generation so great.
“Stephen Keshi came into play and revived it and we saw how we won the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations,” he added.
The former coach of JS Hercules in Finland comparing players with dual citizenship with homegrown players like Victor Osimhen, lamented over the former lack of understanding of what it means to wear a Super Eagles jersey adding that most of them have not played in a Nigeria stadium with such a massive crowd.
He continued: “Football in Nigeria and Africa is a religion. If we don’t have a player like Osimhen who hawked pure water on the Third Mainland bridge, you can see that’s the way he plays, he knows what it takes to play for Nigeria. That’s why he’s running 24/7 to make us win.
“And then you have players who grew up outside the shores of Nigeria that don’t know what it takes to wear the national colours in the World Cup, it is different.
“Several of the players have not been to the World Cup, they don’t know what it is. 99 percent of those players haven’t even felt the Nigerian stadium filled up like the way it was filled up,” he added.
