Our Wasting Sports Sector

An improbable Chelsea season It has been a good season to be a Chelsea supporter. And what a great season it has turned out to be, though mid-way through, nothing gave any indication that Chelsea fans were going to be happy when it started. Unfortunately for his reputation, Andres Villas-Boaz’s exit was the turning point! He was clearly too young, naïve and inexperienced to handle the Chelsea principalities – Frank Lampard, John Terry and others – as he rushed into trying to create a newer, fresher, younger and more creative Chelsea team. Even though AVB’s “project” must have been agreed with the management and owner, he alone would bear the consequences, and soon he was out and Roberto De Matteo, a man who had been fired at lowly West Bromwich Albion just last season, was in as interim coach. Since then, Chelsea’s resurgence began, and a quite improbable FA Cup and EUFA Champions League double have been the reward. From the moment the Champions League final against Bayern Munich began at the German team’s Allianz Arena, there was a sense of a certain Chelsea destiny. When Didier Drogba scored that stunning equaliser two minutes to the end after Bayern scored in the 83rd minute, I became convinced that perhaps the heavens were in Chelsea’s favour that night. Why else would we equalise if Bayern were going to win! The sense of positive Chelsea fate was reinforced when Arjen Robben’s extra-time penalty, conceded by Drogba, was saved by Petr Cech and I was no longer surprised when Drogba fulfilled destiny by scoring the winning goal and bringing the Champions League to Stamford Bridge. The real heroes that night included Roman Abramovic, who had invested so much resources into bringing Chelsea into the top tier of global football; De Matteo; Didier Drogba; Petr Cech; John Mikel Obi, who was fantastic in the middle (by the way, why is it that every single world-class coach at Chelsea – Jose Mourinho, Avram Grant, Gus Hiddink, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Carla Ancellotti and De Matteo – have all found Mikel indispensable in the team, while our local coaches continually seem to want to deprecate his value?); and Ashley Cole. But of course, every Chelsea player, particularly Gary Cahill and David Luiz, all rose to the occasion. So, Chelsea end the season as Champions of Europe and finally stamp their presence in the elite of European soccer. Congratulations to all Chelsea fans! Nigeria’s declining football fortunes In all the joy I felt as a Chelsea fan, there was a definite sorrow in my heart about the current condition of Nigerian football. As a child, the first team I supported was Rangers International of Enugu. Up till the 1977 confrontation between IICC Shooting Stars of Ibadan and Rangers, my team was Rangers, and I have never been able to forget the image of that blockbuster goal scored by Ogidi Ibeabuchi in the Challenge Cup final replay in Kaduna. Later, for many years, as I grew into a full Lagos boy at Igbobi College, I supported Super Stores, and then Abiola Babes after Stores went into extinction. I have told the story in my facebook tribute to Rasheedi Yekini of watching Abiola Babes play New Nigerian Bank at Ogbe Stadium, Benin while I was a youth corps member in Benin in 1986/87. Not being very familiar with the stadium, I had entered through a “wrong” entrance and found myself in the midst of fanatical “Bendel” supporters of NNB. Of course, in the interest of my personal safety, I had to keep quiet and disguise my support for Abiola Babes. Unfortunately, Yekini endangered my life! As he released a fiery and ferocious shot from the centre which hit the bar, I forgot pretence, jumped up and shouted “goal!!!” As I landed, hundreds of NNB supporters chased after me and I ran for my life, never to return for the rest of the match. That was the passion and excitement of local football in Nigeria, until inefficient and visionless government, corruption, age cheating, incompetent administrators, mediocrity and putting people with no passion for the game in charge destroyed our football. Today, our football mirrors the national malaise – untapped potential, turning to foreign products as we have done for rice, medical diagnosis and treatment, education, clothing, shoes, cable television, phones, cars…virtually everything! Now we can’t even run football successfully. For me, the two critical factors we have to address are age cheating and government’s administration of football. Age cheating distorts the talent pool for generations as less-skilled older players deny better-talented younger ones their opportunity; incompetent government administrators who are only interested in the money compound the crisis with poor management and cronyism. The situation in other sports is even worse than in football. Come to think of it, why are Nollywood and Naija music booming, while our football lies comatose? Government! In Nigeria, every service controlled or managed by government is a failure – power, water, public education and health, refineries, security, prisons, public pensions and sports, while the few things that work, at least relatively, are provided by private operators – telecommunications, banking, airlines, private pensions, Nollywood, Naija music, private broadcasting, private education, etc? Sports is big business; it could generate huge resources and help in reducing unemployment. Instead of allowing interested private people create a booming sports business, our administrators, mirroring the rest of government, focus on sharing limited funds appropriated by government. Shame!