Permit me to begin this week’s article with a popular African adage which says when a mosquito perches on a man’s testicles, he must apply wisdom in killing it. If he chooses to use a sledgehammer, he may not live to tell the story.
At the moment, Gernot Rohr, the multi-million naira expatriate coach that the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) first hired in 2016 is sitting unperturbed on the balls of the NFF and as expected, the federation is applying the necessary wisdom to get him off the sensitive spot.
Even before now, there were sustained calls for the Franco-German football tactician to be sacked without further ado. Those who made such passionate calls didn’t care or must have forgotten that in 2020, Rohr renewed his contract with the NFF and his new contract will expire in December 2022.
Therefore, in spite of Rohr’s obvious technical ineptitude, his employers kept faith with him because they had decided to wait for the expiration of his new contract. However, Nigerians were once again forced to rise against the embattled coach after the Super Eagles’ sleep-inducing performances in the 2022 World Cup qualifying matches.
Things got to a head on Tuesday, November 16, the day the Super Eagles literally struggled to survive in the hands of lowly rated Cape Verdeans who were bent on snatching the Qatar 2022 qualifiers playoff ticket from them.
Soon after the make-or—mar contest ended in a 1-1 draw, aggrieved Nigerians descended on Rohr and his players with many calling for the head of the former Bayern Munich defender. Nobody cared about the fact that despite the draw, the Super Eagles still squeezed into the final round of the World Cup Qualifiers.
Like the Jews and Jesus Christ before Pontius Pilate, all that Rohr’s critics wanted at that moment was his immediate sack. They must have forgotten that the same man they wanted crucified so urgently was the same coach who qualified their team for the 2018 World Cup after the Super Eagles’ failure to qualify for two successive AFCON tournaments in 2015 and 2017. Indeed, Nigeria qualified with a game to spare from the group of death comprising Algeria, Cameroon and Zambia.
The former Niger Republic and Burkina Faso manager also led the Super Eagles to a third-place finish at the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations in Egypt. It was after the 2019 AFCON that the NFF decided to reward him with another contract in which he was tasked to qualify the team for the 2022 AFCON in Cameroon and the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
At the risk of offending some people, let me proceed to play the devil’s advocate with the honest submission that Rohr has been unfairly criticised by most of his critics. Yes, the coach cannot be completely exonerated from blame for the sharp decline in the performance of the Super Eagles but his employers must take a bigger chunk of the blame. The NFF should be blamed for handing out ridiculous targets to the coach despite the potential his team possesses. Rohr can rightly feel undervalued now that NFF appears ready to throw him under the bus.
Only few people know that Rohr is not the only one to blame for the woes of the Super Eagles. Therefore, if not for the intervention by the Minister of Sports, Sunday Dare, who insisted that due process must be followed, by now Rohr would have become a former manager of the three-time African champions.
Having read and understood the writing on the wall, Rohr is already in France where he is waiting like a vulture for the NFF to sack and pay him off. I doubt very much, if those who are vehement about his sack know the cost implication. It’s important for them to know.
Here we go. Rohr reportedly earns $50,000 {Twenty-one Million naira) per month. So if he is to be paid off, he will get nothing less than 650,000USD (over Two hundred and Sixty-Six million naira (266m) from now till December 2022. This is no doubt a good bargain for the 68 year old gaffer.
It is said NFF has already reached an agreement with the coach to pay him 50,000 USD monthly till the end of his contract. But he will stop coaching the Super Eagles. However, the day he is employed elsewhere, NFF will stop paying him.
This is no doubt, another classic example of beautiful nonsense. However, Rohr, like a stubborn mosquito, is already on the balls of a perennially broke NFF. To avoid FIFA ban, Nigeria must play safe. It is for this reason that the coach would be smiling to the bank when he is eventually sacked.
If I were the NFF, instead of asking Rohr to walk away with such a princely prize without dropping a sweat, I would give him another responsibility pending the expiration of his contract.
Since his critics usually suspect that he is a football agent masquerading as a coach, I would re-assign him to serve as chief scout for him to continue to globe-trot in search of foreign based Super Eagles. After all, he has been a foreign-based coach.
