Leicester City of England midfielder, Wilfred Onyinyen Ndidi was the centre of attention from soccer fans in Singapore on his arrival for Sunday’s international friendly against Brazil, with not less than 20 excited lovers of the game flooding round to bid him welcome, megasportsarena.com reports.
Ndidi arrived in company of Everton playmaker, Alex Iwobi, after which they were joined by Emmanuel Dennis from Club Brugge of Belgium, Victor Osimhen from Lille Metropole of France and William Troost-Ekong from Udinese of Italy, but it was the Leicester battler who drew the most attention from the ecstatic Singapore soccer faithful.
This comes at a point latest statistics in the English Premier League reveal that Ndidi has a total of 35 tackles in action with Leicester this season, which puts him level with Portugal international fullback, Ricardo Pereira as the top two players that have broken up opponents’ play the most.
Ndidi, though, has played fewer minutes than Pereira, having missed the trip to Sheffield United in August due to a hamstring complaint, but he went on to shore up high marks in games against with nine tackles won versus Newcastle United, four each against Wolverhampton Wanderers, Bournemouth and Tottenham Hotspur, Chelsea (7), Manchester United (5) and Liverpool (2).
The arrivals of Ndidi, Iwobi, Troost-Ekong, Osimhen and Dennis took the total number of Eagles’ invited players to ten, which meant that their coach, Gernot Rohr had a total of ten players on ground late Wednesday to begin preparations ahead of schedule for the prestige friendly.
Rohr’s initial plan had been to commence training on Thursday, as he expected the long distance of flying to Singapore from central Europe to affect most of his players, only to be so pleasantly surprised that that it turned out to be otherwise, and he decided to quickly set plans in motion.
The local media in Singapore noted too that the Eagles arrived a day ahead of schedule, as Rohr himself landed on Tuesday, such that a massive hype ignited immediately, as expectations reached feverish point over what to expect from the Nigerian squad against Brazil on Sunday.
A post on Twitter by ST Sports Desk read: “Nigeria national team @thenff arrive a day ahead of schedule at Fairmont Singapore, as the likes of @Ndidi25 is swarmed by a group of about 20 fans. The Super Eagles will take on @CBF_Futebol on Sunday as part of #BrazilGlobalTour.”