Nigeria’s youth national team, Flying Eagles coach, Isah Ladan Bosso has revealed the chain of issues and factors that finally ld him into his final selection of players for the Africa U-20 Cup of Nations qualifiers in Porto Novo, Benin Republic, megasportsarena.com reports.
Heading into his team’s first game of the competition in the next-door Francophone nation, Boso disclosed that he looked at players graduating from the last under-17 Golden Eaglets’ squad, some new discoveries as well as those who had been active in the Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL) before the season was put on hold in March.
Bosso added that he selected his squad list with the ultimate target of emerging winners of the West African Football Union (WAFU) zone-B elimination series, where his side battled Cote d’Ivoire in their opening match on Sunday at Stade Charles de Gaulle, Porto-Novo.
The former Eaglets’ physical trainer, who was head coach of the Flying Eagles at Canada 2007 FIFA U-20 World Cup, eventually picked a 20-player final squad that has three goalkeepers, six defenders, five midfielders and six strikers.
The tactician added that he was happy to have 2019 Eaglets’ trio of attacker Wisdom Ubani, midfielder Peter Olawale and goalkeeper John Amah on his roster to Porto Novo, while a number of players from the NPFL also made the cut, after they were thoroughly scrutinized by the coaches and backroom staff, with aid from League Management Company (LMC) records.
Bosso told NFF TV: “When we started we put up a template, template in the sense that the players we are going to invite must belong to one or two of those catchment areas. The first one was those players that played in the last U17 though they did not do so well but they qualified to the World Cup, so that U17 was supposed to be what we call as coaches the foundation team.
“During friendly matches we do some checks and balances – elimination by substitution. We thank God that those players that played in the last World Cup in Brazil, automatically some of them graduated, we have about three of them in this squad now.
“Then those Academy players that are playing in different academies but have national team experience, some of them played the last U20, the last U17 and are back to their academies. Those that played U23 are still within the range.
“Another catchment player was those Premier League players that are still within the age of U20, we have to go for them and before that after that doing the paperwork we have to go to LMC to confirm, I got about 32 players playing in the Premier League that are still within the range of U20.
“Another research of these 32, what has been their performances in their clubs and when I confirmed it 17 of them have never featured for their clubs for even one month. We have to check again those that played between 10-25 matches in the league before it was put on hold.
“I now got about nine of them so all those nine were called and when they are called, we do checks and balances and we are able to get this team as it is called today the Flying Eagles for this WAFU tournament.”
