EAGLES IN TRANSITION, MAIGARI TELLS FIFA

By NBF News

Friday, February 04, 2011
• Osaze
Nigeria's Super Eagles are going through a transition period and will soon find their bearing, according to the Nigeria Football Federation's (NFF) President, Alhaji Mohammed Aminu Maigari, when he led a team of members to the FIFA headquarters in Zurich yesterday.

Maigari said, after a closed door meeting with the FIFA's President, Joseph Blatter, that his aims and objectives were to maintain steady football development in Nigeria.'Our goal is to maintain Nigerian football's steady development, although to ensure we continue our development, we have to improve on our structures.

We're very grateful to FIFA for its valuable support in this respect. It's a time of transition for our national team at the moment, and we're working very hard with technical advisers to form a restructured, competitive team as quickly as we can,'he said.

On Eagles' future after last year's FIFA World Cup first round elimination, he said:'The tournament highlighted our problems, and we've learned our lessons from it. Naturally, our immediate goal is to return to competitiveness by putting together a team capable of giving any other side in the world a decent game.

Obviously, we're aware this won't happen overnight, so we'll need a little time. But we've put the requisite development schemes in place, and our hope is we'll soon have a new team which the nation can be proud of.'

Nigeria qualified for this summer's FIFA Women's World Cup 2011 as African champions and there are expectations that the team would perform well in Germany. 'We're optimistic about our chances at the Women's World Cup. The team still has some ways to go in terms of realising its potentialities.