The foreign technical assistant the Nigeria Football Federation is planning to engage for the Super Eagles will not sit on the bench with the Eagles coach, Stephen Keshi, it has been learnt.

The NFF and Keshi have been at loggerheads over the the football house’s plans to hire the services of a foreign coach for the national team, with the former insisting that the coach needed a technical assistant to put up a creditable performance at the Brazil 2014 World Cup.

But former Eagles captain Keshi demanded the reinstatement of his former assistant, Sylvanus Okpala, who was dismissed by the federation after the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations victory.

A member of the NFF Technical Committee, Victor Ikpeba, in a telephone interview with our correspondent on Tuesday, explained that the federation was only trying to help the national team perform at the World Cup.

He added that the job of the assistant would be more of spying on the Eagles’ opponents and not sitting on the bench with the technical crew during games.

“The federation is only trying to help. When we talk of a technical assistant, we are talking about someone that can spy on our opponents. It’s something that is done all over the world,” the 1996 Olympic Games gold medallist said.

“We need to explain things properly to Nigerians. The assistant is definitely not going to sit with Keshi on the bench. All I have heard in the media is just to create confusion. There was never a time we talked about a technical adviser for the national team.

“We are number one in Africa and we are doing everything possible to ensure that the team succeeds at the World Cup. That is why we are doing everything to see how the team and Keshi can succeed.”

The former AS Monaco striker added that the technical committee had a meeting with Keshi before the African Nations Championship in January to brief him on the plans of the technical committee.

Ikpeba said, “There is no way anyone would want the coach to fail. We spoke with him before the commencement of CHAN and we suggested ways to support him.

“We know Argentina, but we don’t know much about Bosnia and Iran. So, we need someone, who can embark on a spying mission of these countries for us. When we play Mexico next month in the US, our World Cup opponents are certainly going to be around to spy on us. But we don’t have anyone like that.

“We won the Africa Cup of Nations doesn’t mean that we are perfect. We want to go to Brazil and do well and make things difficult for our opponents.”

-Punch

Posted by admin on Feb 12 2014. Filed under Headlines, Soccer, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry