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Odegbami: Reminiscences – Alan Hawkes and Lee Evans

Permit me to tell you about two foreigners that played very significant roles in my career in football. I do not expect that many younger people will know, or even remember them. The first is my first contact with a foreign coach. Playing under him took me to the tipping point, that moment, in time and circumstance, that makes the difference between being  good  and becoming  great  in an athletic career. Allan Hawkes  took me there. He was the White, British-born coach of  IICC Shooting Stars FC  when I joined the club as a student of the Polytechnic, Ibadan, in 1974. Before I joined ‘ Sooting ’ I was already a rising star in the football circuit of Western Nigeria. I had played for a few small clubs that actually won laurels in that part of the country. I was even shockingly awarded best player of the Ibadan Football Association, IFA, league (the biggest league in Western Nigeria). I had played for  NTC Football Club  and w...
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Odegbami: Victor Moses And The Burden Of Being Captain!

He is 27 years old. Under normal circumstances no player voluntarily retires from international football at an age that he is at his very best – experienced, mature, exposed, comfortable and at the peak of his physical fitness. So, to retire at 27 means something is not right somewhere. This is the case of Victor Moses. It may take a psychoanalysis of his situation to understand his motivation for announcing his retirement from the national team this week. In the line of hierarchical succession Victor Moses should naturally become the  Super Eagles ’next captain and the heart of a new assembly of players that shall emerge from the debris of the 2018 World Cup campaign. So, with his premature retirement some things do not add up. For the first time since he started representing Nigeria many years ago I saw him from close up in Russia during the last World Cup. I actually shared a sentence or two with him, and took a picture with him for the first time in a relat...
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Odegbami: Liberty Stadium, Ibadan – A Metaphor For The South West!

Were Chief Obafemi Awolowo to wake up from his place of eternal rest and see what has become of the Western Region of Nigeria, one of the places that would make him wail the loudest would be the Liberty Stadium, Ibadan. He would wonder how a people he left, sophisticated, enlightened and largely educated, with respect for values and a way of life that set them apart from the rest, would destroy one of their greatest legacies on the altar of personal interests, materialism, bad conduct and poor political judgements. Awo would be dazed at the catastrophe that has bedeviled the several infrastructures and institutions that his government and those of his immediate successors established and carefully programmed to take the region, and by extension the rest of the country and the Black race, to the pinnacle of global emancipation and development.The geographical disfiguration of Western Nigeria in an obscure structural and political arrangement has fragmented rather than united th...
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