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The comment by Super Falcons coach Randy Waldrum was far from surprising considering his meagre pedigree at the highest level of football.
The comment made by the Super Falcons coach was far from surprising considering his meagre pedigree at the highest level of football.
On Friday morning, social media erupted with reactions aplenty following the statement credited to Nigeria coach Randy Waldrum at the ongoing Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON).
The Super Falcons rebounded from their opening defeat to South Africa to beat Botswana 2–0 on Thursday night. The performance, while improved, was far from swashbuckling, but it was an important result nonetheless to get Nigeria back on track for a place in the last eight.
In reacting to a much-needed win though, Waldrum lodged his foot firmly in his mouth.
“Quite honestly, the media in Nigeria is very negative,” he said in the post-match press conference. “We just don’t want that in our camp… we don’t need distractions in our camp.”
There is some background to this.
Nigerian journalists who made their way to Morocco expecting to cover the Super Falcons and collate content have run into a brick wall. Stringent measures put in place by the technical crew have severely limited their access to the team, to the point where they have been restricted to the 15-minute window mandated by CAF at the start of training sessions.
This state of affairs has led the media to cry out, and it is against this backdrop that Waldrum’s comments are best understood.
Quite apart from the fact that Waldrum has picked a lost battle if ever there was one, there is little to his assessment of the Nigerian press as negative. If anything, for such opinionated people, its sporting press corps is remarkably tame.
There are a number of responsible factors for this, one of which will be touched on later in this article, but even the most cursory comparison with, say, the UK press would show this statement up as erroneous at best and disingenuous at worst.
Of course, managers resisting access to their teams during major tournaments is nothing new. It is their prerogative. However, and this is important, it has often been a measure taken either to arrest mayhem or artificially create a siege mentality. Even then, it is never actually as total as this shutout has apparently been.
If Waldrum’s aim is to focus the minds of his players by cloistering them away in their camp and convincing them the world is against them, that is fair enough. However, throwing the media under the bus in the process is off-base, and to justify that by tarring an entire industry with the same brush is unwise.
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To be charitable to him, perhaps it seems like there is an overwhelming amount of negativity simply because he has never coached at this level before.
Aside from a two-year dalliance with the women’s national team of Trinidad and Tobago in the mid-2010s, he has spent all of his close-to-30-year coaching career in the American university circuit. Going from that to the expectation of a nine-time African champion backed by the force of over 150 million voices must be a huge shock to the system for him. Losing to South Africa twice already, and in such a humbling fashion on both occasions, may seem to him like a light issue, but it is rather remarkable that he expected any less than the angry, disappointed reaction that followed.
The fact that he thought it would be glossed over is proof that he is out of his depth in the role, and he would do well to educate himself quickly on the nature of the position he was appointed into.
If reports are to be believed, a measure of damage limitation will no doubt take place, and Waldrum will walk back his bizarre diatribe. Following this, there might even be some conciliation from him toward the media in the form of a softening of his hardline stance. If that all comes off, would all be well in the world then?
Hardly.
His attitude to the Nigerian media is more a symptom than anything. It speaks to the lack of professionalism and process that governs the interaction of Nigerian national teams with the media. It is only within the wild west, catch-as-catch-can landscape of media relations in this part of the world that a manager would consider the press an obstruction and an inconvenience. “We don’t need media following us around”? Really?
It is as a result of this failure of administration on the part of the Nigerian football apparatus that members of the Nigerian press often have to rely on the good graces of individual players. Being beholden to the players one is meant to be covering dispassionately and objectively makes for a suboptimal dynamic, and contributes to the relative lack of bite that is the hallmark of a lot of its reports.
If the NFF is serious about forestalling these occurrences, it behoves them to alter this state of affairs, and put in place a robust, fair framework, with clear rules of engagement between the press and the national teams. What exactly are the obligations of the coaches and players to members of the press, both in and out of competition? What happens when those responsibilities are not met, or if the privilege is abused?
These are the questions that need to be answered, beyond the private upbraiding and insincere apology that are set to follow.
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