Former captain of the senior national team of Nigeria John Obi Mikel has given a word of advice to the incumbent coach of the team Jose Peseiro on how to get the team back to its best.
Mikel quit international football in 2019 after the Africa Cup of Nations where the team won bronze and has since seen the team fail to build on that achievement the past two years.
Nigeria had their worst Africa Cup of Nations performance in over 40 years when they crash out of the round of 16 losing 0-1 to Tunisia. Their case was made worst when they lost out on a spot in the World Cup by losing on away goals to Ghana.
That failure led to the sack of Austine Eguavoen with Jose Peseiro named as his replacement. Peseiro has started on a sound note by winning his first two competitive games 2-1 against Sierra Leone and 10-0 away to Sao Tome and Principe all in the qualifiers for the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations.
In the words of Mikel, the team still has quality players and called on Peseiro to limit the amount of new players called up to the team in order to build a strong core of players.
“I do believe in the abilities of most of the players in the camp now. They have the strength, they are fast and talented. All we need to do is to find a way to ensure they all work together as a unit with the likes of Joe Aribo, Alex Iwobi, Kelechi Iheanacho and Samuel Chukwueze playing for one another. And one more thing I need to say, we need to find a group and when you find the group, you start working with the group and then you start adding others to make a team but in the past few years what we have been doing is adding almost 10 fresh players for every match and the experiment has been unending”, he said.
” Unfortunately, we don’t have a core group but we keep experimenting instead injecting some of the domestic league players with the core group”, he rounded up.
