MIKEL REVEALS DISUNITY, DRESSING ROOM FIGHTS IN NIGERIA’S PREVIOUS WORLD CUP TEAMS
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Nigeria captian Mikel Obi has sensationally revealed that the Nigerian
team could have won the World Cup if they were united.
Mikel who missed out on the 2010 edition of the World Cup but
participated at the 2014 showpiece in Brazil said previous squads
didn’t have the same unity like the present team and that affected
their performance.
According to Mikel, Nigeria could have won the World Cup in the past
but the fact that players were not united and officials were also
having issues with the team . Something that isn’t visible in this
present crop of Super Eagles players and management of the team.
He said the problem of the Nigerian team at previous World Cups has
always centred around poor organisation and poor discipline among the
players, who were up against themselves also affected Nigeria at
previous tournaments.
“There were a lot of problems in the camp which a lot of people didn’t
see, the media didn’t see – we kind of hid it under the table. The
relationships between the players were not good and there was no
discipline. There was no good feeling, no good vibe”, Mikel said in an
interview with The Guardian.
“It almost got to people being pinned up against dressing-room walls,
although not quite. It was confrontation and arguments. Players wanted
to do their own thing and they didn’t think about the team.”
Mikel is looking ahead to captaining Nigeria at the Russia World Cup
and the preparations will ramp up on Saturday with the friendly
against England at Wembley – the scene of some of Mikel’s most
memorable triumphs from his 10 and a half seasons at Chelsea. The
31-year-old is now at Tianjin Teda in the Chinese Super League.
But the past is unavoidable for Nigeria and it has shaped what is a
new era for them under the manager, Gernot Rohr – a disciplinarian
German – and Mikel, whose status within the setup goes way beyond
wearing the armband on match days.
The turmoil in Brazil had followed similar internal conflict at the
2010 World Cup in South Africa, when Nigeria departed at the group
phase. Mikel missed the tournament through injury but he heard the
stories and, afterwards, the then Nigeria president, Goodluck
Jonathan, ruled that the national team should be suspended from
competition for two years. The measure would be rescinded but it
illustrated the depths of the despair; the sense that the squad had
become ungovernable.
“There were massive problems in the camp and that’s why the president
got upset,” Mikel says. “He said: ‘Until you guys fix yourselves up,
that’s it. No more.’ The public were upset but they were in support of
it because they also wanted whatever was going on to stop. We couldn’t
keep going to tournaments and making a mockery of ourselves.”
“The coach and myself, as captain, have tried to make these young
players realise that we are a team, not individuals,” Mikel says. “If
you don’t want to play together, you are welcome to leave. It’s
amazing now to go to camp. You can feel the good feelings.
“I have been in the national team since 2005 and I haven’t seen this
discipline before. It is meetings, being on time, the training.
Sometimes a player has the hump because he knows he is not going to
make the team and, before in the national team, he just strolls
around. Now, you have to train properly. If you don’t, you are leaving
the camp. The coach has changed the whole mentality.”
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