Nigeria’s senior national team head coach, Sunday Oliseh has intervened in the uproar involving the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) and captain Vincent Enyeama. The football governing body is bent on punishing the Lille skipper over his unguarded statement on the choice of Kaduna as the host of Nigeria’s Afcon qualifier against Chad (held last month) and his refusal to appear before the disciplinary committee.
Oliseh, who leapt to the goal keeper’s defence few weeks back has promised to resolve the matter ahead of Nigeria’s Africa Cup of Nations game against Tanzania in September.
The midfield ace told Super Sports, “This is a touchy issue and one has to be careful how he treads on this. The first thing to do is to hear both sides. I have already spoken to the federation and they provided some very tangible reasons for the steps they took.
“However, when Enyeama made that statement, he was and is still the captain of the Super Eagles of Nigeria. You cannot forbid the captain from speaking out; it becomes autocratic if you do that and I would not want to do that as a coach.
“But at the same time, we can also caution and say ‘we don’t want such kinds of utterances because it may bring about a negative effect or whatever. I however think that he may have spoken out because of what he had already discussed with his teammates.
“Maybe he spoke out on behalf of his team-mates and I don’t think we should stop someone from speaking out when he’s the captain. However we cannot have all the players speaking out because that would be tantamount to chaos.
“I will speak to the captain and we will look at the way forward because I still view him as one of the best goalkeepers we have,” he said.
