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Nigeria’s Olympic winner Bonfrere Jo shares reasons why Super Eagles are struggling
By Oyediji Oluwaseun Babatunde
Former coach of the Nigeria national team, Johannes Bonfrere says coaching is one of the reasons for the recent struggles of the country’s senior national team in international competitions.
The Dutch, who won Atlanta 96 Gold medal with Nigeria men’s U23 side and led the West Africans to the 2000 finals of the Africa Cup of Nations, where they lost to Cameroon on penalties, is back in the country to oversee coaching and training sessions over the five days of the QNETCity Football Clinic.
The experienced tactician believes that coaching style has a lot in determining the output and result of games.
“I can tell you from my experience why Nigeria isn’t playing well. I have worked here day and night starting with 35 players and selected some good players. We have sent some not-so-good players home.” Bonfrere Jo told pressmen in a media parley held in Lagos on Friday.
“I started with these players and grow with them with good relationships to improve every player through personal contacts and meetings. We spoke about the players’ strong and weak points. This is the way a coach builds up his team.
“It’s not that you seat behind the desk to let somebody do the training and talking and then say hey we have a game, what’s the lineup to start playing? I must think about my lineup. If every play has a good quality disposition. Every player has a different characters and mentality.
“It’s important to work with different players’ mentality. You have to learn every player’s mentality. The most important thing that the coach has to do is to try to look inside the heart of the players. If he has this in control, he can do everything with the player because of the respect from each player.
“It’s not that a player is doing something wrong and then you shout at him which won’t bring respect.
You must know as a coach what kind of mentality the players have and how you can work with it.
“In my time, I can say to a player, hey you can do much better. To another player I can say, hey you go, you must do much better because we know each other and how we can speak to each other. That is very important to build up a team.
“You must also have the knowledge of football as a coach and there is a tactical way of training. When a player is doing something wrong, I go to the other side and tell him how to do it right. When a player isn’t doing well, I give him specific information.
“To build up a team, you need as a coach to know how you can work with the players mentally and physically, otherwise there is no good team to build up.”
The QNETCity Coaching Clinic in Nigeria aims to enable young footballers from different states to find common ground and a source of encouragement to envisage a better future.
The project kicked off in Nigeria with 26 boys under the age of 17 years which started on May 8, 2023, in ABEOKUTA, and ended on Thursday, 11th May 2023
