President Goodluck Jonathan

By Muhammad Bello

Members of the Super Eagles have been urged by President Goodluck Jonathan, to work towards success in their game in Monrovia on Saturday.

This is coming in the wake of the establishment of a special committee at the Federal Executive Council meeting earlier in the day to look at how the lost glory of the nation’s sports could be restored.

President Jonathan admonished the team on what is expected of them this weekend when he visited them at their training session at the Abuja Stadium on Wednesday.

The national team is billed to slug it out with Liberia in a qualifying match for the 2013 African Nations Cup taking place in South Africa.

Encouraging the players to work hard to ensure they do well in the match, Jonathan said sports hold a strategic position in his administration’s agenda and promised that he would re-invigorate the sector.

He challenged the footballers to make the nation proud once more by repeating the feast of the Dream Team at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, USA, where Nigeria won gold in the football event.

Away from the match, the President also expressed his displeasure over the poor state of the Abuja Stadium which was overgrown with weeds at the time of his visit.

He therefore ordered the stadium management to correct the anomaly immediately.

Incidentally on the day President Jonathan made a surprise visit to the Eagles’ Wednesday evening training session, his Liberian counterpart, President Sirleaf-Johnson was also doing some mobilisation of her own for the match, when she constituted a committee, led by former President of the Liberian Football Federation, Edwin Snowe, to motivate the public against the visiting Super Eagles.