Revive other LG soccer bodies

Revive other LG soccer bodies

By Clem Oluwole

A couple of months ago, one of the regular readers of this column bumped into me one evening and put a question straight to my face. He asked: ‘Why do you write about football most of the time?

The question took me unawares and for a couple of seconds, I found myself digging the ground for an answer.

And before I could answer, he added: ‘I can see you are kicking the ground. Is it because you are a footballer?’

Still I did not know exactly how to frame the answer; so we simply laughed over it.

There is no doubt that there are scores of my readers who share the same opinion. And I do not need to bite the cover of my pen this time before providing an answer. You see, football is acclaimed as the most popular sport and it is highly entertaining as well. I love playing football. I spent most of my good old days playing the game, rising to the level of coach/player for Gwandu XI in Birnin Kebbi, some few years back. I was also the team coach of Government Secondary School, Birnin Kebbi. I also participated in other sports like lawn tennis, boxing, fencing, local wrestling and athletics during my school days. Perhaps I still devote my precious time to football because after school days, I continued playing active football until about one decade ago when I joined this pen profession and I had to hang my boots, because the pen proved mightier than the ball. Even up till now, I itch to play football because I retired from active football prematurely. But poor me, the stamina or what present footballers refer to as ‘gas’ is not adequate enough to carry one through for as long as one may wish to last in the game.

This week, the topic again is on football. But remember, it wasn’t football last week. Today, I want to appeal to the Plateau Football Association (PFA) to do Plateau football a big favour. Every now and then, our sports administrators express willingness to develop sports… eerr… football at the grassroots level. In other words, they mean digging for talents in the rural areas.

In the days of the defunct Benue-Plateau state, the state’s FA had on its annual calendar what it tagged as full council meeting. The meeting embraced all the chairmen of LG football associations, their secretaries and one or two executive members with the chairman of the state’s FA presiding. Matters relating to football, its problems, organisation and future plans were tabled and discussed at that forum. The last meeting of Benue-Plateau FA Full Council Meeting was held at Keffi and I was there as an observer. Such a forum afforded those connected with football administration the opportunity to discuss the problems facing the sport in the state and solutions were found to them and football was making steady progress. Each LG football association was functioning properly and football was not organized in isolation. Right now, some LGs are virtually dead soccer-wise. The revival of Jos Amateur Football Association (JAFA) is an outstanding achievement the present PFA has recorded so far. The PFA should go a step further by reviving other LG football associations so they could organize intra-LG soccer championship with a view to developing the game as well as unearthing hidden talents.

The council meeting is a venture the state’s sports Council should encourage morally and financially.

The PFA should set 1980 as its target.

(Culled from Saturday Commentary, first published on November 3, 1979.)