The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) is at a cross-road over the choice of the chief coach for the national Under-23 soccer team, the Dream Team.
The federation already have two qualified candidates for the position in the persons of two former Super Eagles players and coaches, Samson Siasia and Fatai Amoo.
The NFF Technical Committee has endorsed embattled Sunshine Stars coach, Fatai Amoo for the job but are still awaiting the final ratification of the Executive Board of the NFF before the trainer’s appointment would be made public. It was also learnt that the coach has not received his letter of appointment to that effect.
The NFF has now given room for some board members and member of the Technical Committee of the NFF to re-assess the situation and wants somebody that had handled the job well before to take over the U23 national team job.
Goal’s investigations revealed that some of the football big wigs despite having a reservation for former coach Samson Siasia as allegedly being arrogant, they were of the opinion that the Bayelsa-born coach will handle the team better since he took the same team to the final of the 2008 Beijing Olympics where Nigeria bowed to the superiority of Argentina 1-0 to win the silver medal of the football event.
Some were of the opinion that since Amoo has not handled a national team before he should start from the national U20 team to gather national team experience despite being an experienced coach from the domestic league. Ben Iroha is also warming up for the Flying Eagles job and has been endorsed by some members of the Executive Committee of the NFF too.
As it stands now only, Fatai Amoo has a good chance of at least manning either the U20 or the U23 national teams.
Recently Siasia made it public that he is open to handling the junior national team again but he has told Goal that he won’t handle any other team but the U- 23 national team. This has made it difficult for the football house to come out with a final decision on the matter.
Football loving Nigerians are anxiously waiting for how the Barrister Christopher Green led NFF Technical Committee to resolve this problem on time for the concerned coaches to start work on time before the qualifiers for the next edition of African championships.
