Super 6 Fired Up! | How Teams Play Competitve Football for Pride

Super 4 this year took a different structure and focus. In the previous years, no coach would break his head or have his players go all out to suffer hamstring just to win the tournament. Coaches use the pre-season tournament just to try out different patterns that could work them when Glo Premier League kicks-off. 

Warri Wolves Line Up

The league isn’t kicking off soon till March. But Kano Pillars, winners of 2014 Premier league; Enyimba, the first runner up and Warri Wolves, the second runner up will be involved in Caf Champions league fixture by February. Dolphins of Port Harcourt will also be participating in Caf Cup earlier before the commencement of the league and the fear that these Nigerian club sides won’t get enough competitive games to shape up the boys before their Caf Champions league engagement, may have given Super 4 tournament a different focus altogether.

Kano Pillars in Action

Then, NFF decided to include National U20 team (Flying Eagles), which also has African Youth Championship to play in March, and  U23 (Dream Team) has Olympics qualifiers, changed the structure of the tournament to Super 6.

The competition has really fired up and it’s now more a thing of pride. The league champions wouldn’t want the Age group national teams, especially the U20 to beat them. Equally, the national teams see it more as an insult to their status if a league side defeats them.

Flying Eagles

Well, the Dream team defeated Warri Wolves 2 – 1; and U20 beat the Enyimba 2- 0. But just yesterday, the U20 team defeated Kano Pillars again 2 – 1.

The tournament has been very competitive. It has also been an opportunity to see some of new foreign players that were added to the National team: Alex Iwobi, and Semi Ajayi, both of Arsenal FC in England and Moses who recently signed a new deal with Gents in Belgium.

The level of competition has been good, that’s what the tournament is meant to achieve this year. However, we want to warn that the issue of Pride shouldn’t be stressed so much. We don’t want a situation where players are injured and not available for the real assignment next month – Caf Champions League and African Youth Championship. So player should rather play with caution.