By Victor Kanayo
The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) on Wednesday shifted blames to World Football governing body FIFA and an unnamed contracted airline on why the country’s U20 women team stayed for 24 hours at Istanbul, Turkey.
The Nigerian football body in a statement made available to Heritage Times HT, also said that a number of factors, including the inability to secure transit visas for players and officials of the Falconets at the Istanbul Airport, led to the team having to stay 24 hours at the airport in Turkey on their way from the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup.
The statement sigend by NFF General Secretary, Dr Mohammed Sanusi, through the Federation’s communication department read in part, “The NFF did not book the team’s tickets from Costa Rica; FIFA did. FIFA also did not envisage the hitches that saw the team delayed for more than three hours in Bogota, and another one hour in Panama. By the time the team got to Istanbul, the flight to Abuja had left.
“Our officials pleaded for compassionate transit visas so as to take the players and officials to a hotel inside the town, but this was not possible as they were informed that Nigeria had been removed from the list of countries whose citizens were issued visa-on-arrival in Turkey. The airline then took the team to a sleeping area at the airport and gave them tickets to have meals every five hours. This situation has nothing to do with NFF, who had made arrangements to receive the team in Abuja before the complications in travel arrangements.
“It would be recalled that the NFF had implored world-governing body, FIFA to intervene with the Embassy of Germany to issue the team transit visas before their departure from Nigeria, in order for the team to be able to travel through Germany. This did not happen.”
On the issue of body-wear, Sanusi said: “The players were handed three sets of green jerseys and two sets of white jerseys, several house-wear types and training jerseys. The players opted to wash only their jersey top (no other stuff) because when the first set of body-wear was sent to the laundry people at the hotel, it returned with some FIFA and NFF badges at the front and names at the back peeled by the machine.”
The two times FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup finalists left Costa Rica on Monday at 6:30am (Nigerian Time).
They were pictured sleeping on bare floor and chairs at the Istanbul Airport after staying at same spot for 24 hours.
Falconets won all the three group C matches to earn maximum nine points but their superb performance was put to a halt at the quarter final when Netherlands beat them 2-0.
This is not the first time the national team will suffer similar humiliating circumstance.
Few weeks before their departure from Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, to the tournament, they were left alone, a situation that forced both players and officials to trek to the venue of their training.
