Former Super Eagles head coach, Samson Siasia has revealed that the country’s senior men’s national team can do without a foreign manager.
This is coming as the Nigeria Football Federation is mulling the appointment of a foreigner to tinker the three-time African champions for the remaining 2926 FIFA World Cup qualification next year.
The Super Eagles are currently fifth behind Rwanda, South Africa, Benin Republic and Lesotho in the 6-team group with three points from four games having drawn three and lost one.
Rubbishing the proposition of another foreign manager for the Super Eagles, the former Flying Eagles and Olympic team helmsman said, “We don’t want any foreign coach here because they are not coming to do anything. We have enough good materials at home that we should not be talking about hiring a foreign coach”.
The 57-year-old also called on interim head coach, Austine Eguavoen to officially resign from his role with the Super Eagles, and focus on his primary job as the technical director of the country’s football governing body.
Even though Eguavoen successfully guided the team to qualification for the Africa Cup of Nations next year in an interim capacity, the NFF haven’t made a statement on his status with the team ahead of the resumption of the qualifiers for the World Cup.
Siasia however, believes that his former teammate should choose between being a coach or the technical director of the NFF.
“As for Austin Eguavoen’s future with the Super Eagles, I will suggest that we wait a while to see how the team will be. It is a very young team. Eguavoen has a job already as the technical director. He should resign as Super Eagles manager and concentrate on his job. He cannot hold two positions at the same time. He should actually decide on which one to hold and leave the other,”.
The 1994 AFCON winners and two-time Olympic Games medal-winning coach on Thursday, 22 August, completed a five-year ban imposed by FIFA for a match-fixing allegation.
The ban, initially a lifetime one, was reduced on appeal to five years by the Court of Arbitration for Sports (CAS) in 2019.
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