End of An Era 

Christened Chairman by the late renowned sports commentator, Ernest Okonkwo, Christian Chukwu passed away last Saturday in Enugu, aged 74. Aside being the Captain of the Green Eagles that won the first African Cup of Nations for Nigeria in 1980, he was the defensive rock of the team. Little wonder, President Bola Tinubu described him as a ‘symbol of excellence and patriotism. His humility and patriotism has also been praised to high heavens by former compatriots. Below is what Christian Chukwu told Kunle Adewale in 2016 on the dwindling fortune of football in Nigeria in recent years, the height being the Super Eagles failing to hoist the country’s flag at the 2015 and 2017 editions of AFCON

The former captain and coach of the national team, Christian Chukwu, blamed successive football administrations for lack of planning and development of the game.

“Each time the tenure of an administration ends there are always controversies as to who becomes the president and members of the board, which in most cases end in long court cases and at the end of the day there is little or no time to take off. So, we don’t come in with any tangible programme, rather we just enter for competitions without proper planning. I have never seen any of the administrations that shoots off with any developmental programme. We don’t have a sustainable programme, all we are after is just to participate in competitions.

Chukwu is also of the opinion that until we go back to the basics-school sports, the country will continue to be confronted with the same problem.

“It was from school sports and grassroots football that some of us emerged,” he noted.

The former Super Eagles coach also faulted the idea of heavily depending on foreign-based players, saying attention should be focused on the development of the local league, whereby the nucleus of the national team should be home-based.

“You don’t build a national team in a foreign land. You don’t build a national team with entirely foreign players. It cannot work, even if they are all Peles. We have lot of talented players in Nigeria to form a formidable national team. We just need to inject three to five foreign players into the team.

“That is how to build a national team. I don’t see why we cannot have a 19-year-old player in our national team? It took a lot of pressure to inject Kelechi Iheanacho into our national team. It is the young players that would provide longevity and that is how to build a team. It is not all about winning all the time,” Chukwu had opined.