Is Eguavoen Justified By Selecting Umar and Iheanacho Ahead of Maja, Akpom, Dessers and Arokodare?

Expecting Coach Eguavoen to invite certain players is proving to be a hiding-to-nothing these days.

In fairness to the 59 year old tactician, all national team coaches have their favorites regardless of how unproductive these players are in their clubs, so long as they are fit. So the tendency to go against the grain of picking better performing players for national team assignments is quaquaversal in international coaching landscape.

Iheanacho is slowly working his way back to optimum and peak performance. Umar has clocked many minutes in the league but both are estranged with the back of the net in the Spanish La Liga . However, Eguavoen believes he can unlock their scoring proficiency for the Super Eagles.

Boniface is a top quality centre forward who just needs to be positioned correctly in the Super Eagles to produce outputs analogous to those he belches out regularly in his club.

In total, I think Eguavoen's list of strikers/wingers this time around is a scatter-gun assemblage which, in truth, doesn't strike all the acceptability targets in its sight but takes down enough for me to label it as satisfactory.

You have heavy hitters like Lookman and Simon who will serve as foils to the irrepresible Osihmen (who continues to cut a wide swath for Galastaray this season across competitions) with the likes of Umar and Iheanacho playing negligible roles. Hopefully the stars will soon start to align for Boniface.

I don't think Eguavoen likes the attacking profile of Dessers when you juxtapose it against that of Umar or Iheanacho. He has worked with the latter duo and knows how to get the attacking tuning-fork of their brains to vibrate goals and produce the goods in Super Eagles colours.

I personally think NFF have blacklisted Chuba Akpom for dragging his feet before jumping on the Super Eagles bandwagon of available dual nationality options. Josh Maja may get a look-in so also Arokodare so long as they don't relent in bleeding out ruthlessness in front of goal for their clubs.

Any hopes of seeing the likes of Akpoguma feature under Eguavoen have to defenestrated. Only Eguavoen can answer why he continuously gives the consideration of certain players a wide berth. But my sense is that he feels their skill do not stick-the-landing of what he requires to bring his formation alive and philosophy to bear successfully.

I guess, on a lighter note, when you only need 1 goaless draw across 2 matches to seal the deal, inviting toothless Iheanacho and Umar makes sense at some level.