Gabby for Super Eagles?

I was informed by a Ghanaian colleague that Ghana's Sulley Muntari is of Nigerian decent. While I'm unable to confirm that,It's interesting that important players in many countries have links to Nigeria .

I must confess that when I first heard of Michael Essien about 5 years ago, I thought he was Nigerian as well, mainly because of his name.

This brings me to the on going debate on Gabriel Agbonlahor decision to play for England.

Without any doubt, Nigeria is blessed with a lot of talent, and commentators never fail to remind us of this fact especially when some players do not show commitment to the Super Eagles programs. This fact has also been repeated in the case of Gabriel Agbonlahor, who has decided to play for England .

While we cannot use all these talented players at the same time, we surely need to know that they're available for us whenever we need them. This cannot be achieved by simply sending out invitation letters to them simply because they have a link to Nigeria . At the moment we have fair few players who can be become eligible to play for us if we work on them. I will use Gabby,Nedum Onuoha of Man City and Sunny of Valencia as example.

International football at the moment is a lot like club football -as a result globalization
players now have a lot of options. As a result, you need to convince a player on the merits of playing for you, just like you do when you want to sign a player for a club. The manager needs to work hard with the support of the FA Chief executive or the FA secretary to "sign" a player for your federation. This may include presenting your programs, your targets and the marketing opportunities that will come from playing for you.

With this in mind and looking at the needs of the Super Eagles at the moment in terms of personnel, they,in my opinion includes but not limited to, a left winger(Agbonlahor),a right wing back(Onuoha) and a sitting/holding midfielder(Sunny), we need to talk to Gabby, Onuoha and Sunny to convince them to change allegiance to Nigeria. While coach Amodu has done well with his tactics to take care of these needs at the moment, I'm sure his tactics is not set in stone and that he will make changes depending on the opposition and players available, therefore the availability of these players, will surely expand his options.

We must also note that these three players are representative of whom to look for. We need to do further research on clubs in Europe to find players of Nigerian decent. Thankfully with the internet, it’s a lot easier to identify them and make enquiries about them.

Do you know?

That Shuaibu Amodu was the first coach to make Joseph Yobo captain of the Super Eagles. The match was an ANC qualifier in June 2001 against Namibia in Windhoek . Nigeria won the game 2-0.