File image of Westerhouf and Okocha. Credit: Instagram/clemens_westerhof.
Nigerian football has seen better days. Unfortunately, those days – when an everyday football fan on the street could name Nigeria’s first X1 offhandedly – have become a very distant past. After the heroics of the 1980 AFCON winning era, Nigerian football blossomed again between 1990 – ‘98. That was a period Nigerians rightly call the golden era of modern Nigerian football folklore.
The architect of that memorable spell, Clemens Westerhof is still very much attached to Nigeria, long after leaving the Super Eagles at the expiration of his contract in 1994. He was engaged in 1989 as coach of the national team. Westerhof took the Super Eagles to win silver medal in his maiden AFCON appearance in 1990. They won bronze at Senegal 1992 after defeating Cameroon 2-1 in the third-place playoff match with goals from Friday Ekpo and Rashidi Yekini. In 1994 he put the icing on the cake by winning the AFCON in Tunisia and qualified Nigeria to her first FIFA World Cup finals. At the tournament in the USA, Nigeria played so well that the Super Eagles were rated joint most entertaining side in the world with Brazil and ranked 5th best national team by FIFA, the highest by an African team.
