Despite seeing his team fail to make it out of the group stage of the Olympic women’s football tournament, Nigeria coach Randy Waldrum believes the Super Falcons are not far from the world’s top teams.
The American coach also expressed his hope that he would be allowed to carry on and refresh the team with younger players going forward.
In their fourth Olympic appearance, and first in 16 years, the Super Falcons failed to win a single game, going down 1-0 to Brazil and Spain before seeing their hopes of progress extinguished 3-1 by Japan. In a bizarre coincidence, the results were the exact same as they posted at their most recent appearance, in 2008.
But Waldrum insists that the team not only has the talent, with a balanced mix of experienced core and young players, but have also made enough progress to match up against any of the world’s top sides.
“Our players are extremely talented,” he told Citysports. “That’s always been the history of Nigeria, it has extremely talented players. And I think this one could be a special group. We’ve shown our quality against some of the best teams in the world.”
Blessed with the experience of players like Asisat Oshoala, Rasheedat Ajibade, Osinachi Ohale, Uchenna Kanu, along with promising youngsters like Deborah Abiodun, Tosin’s Demehin, Rofiat Imuran and Nicole Payne, Waldrum believes there is a bright future for the team.
He added: “I’m excited about the young players but I really do like the core of our team. I guess the one thing I said after the World Cup, and I would continue to say it now publicly, is if we will invest in this team, as a federation and a country, this team would have a chance to be one of the best in the world.”
To get to that position, Waldrum, who also time-shares as coach of the University of Pittsburgh women’s soccer team, would like to see the kind of organization that teams in the US enjoy that optimize their potentials, but says so far, he has not quite succeeded.
Waldrum continued: “One of the things I really hoped I could do when I came to Nigeria as a coach, is to bring some experiences of the way we do things in the US, with our organization, and with our preparation, but for whatever reason we still battle some of the same issues.”
A lot of those organizational issues include staggered travel arrangements that leaves players arriving in batches for training camp, visa troubles, lack of an advanced schedule and payment issues. Waldrum says to make the Super Falcons one of the top teams in the world, changes will be necessary.
This is similar to the kind of talk that got the American in a bit of hot water with the Nigeria Football Federation prior to the 2023 World Cup. But with fences mended, the coach was keen to make it clear that he was not taking shots at the NFF, only trying to point out how things could be better.
He said: “I don’t want to revive that. But I would say this, and I don’t mean it in a bad way towards the Federation: I do think that we can do with changes in some of this.”
He continued: “It may come down to finances and that part I’m not involved with because I don’t know the financial situation of the NFF, and how it works with the government. I can tell you from a coaching perspective, I’ll give you a good example.
“When we played Cameroon in the Olympic qualifiers, we had a 10-day FIFA international window. But we ended up traveling most of the window. Some of the players were even a couple of days late. We had to come to Nigeria first.
“So we fly from Europe, the US wherever our players are playing and we fly into Nigeria, then we have to turn around a day and a half later, and fly to Cameroon because we’re playing a game like three days or four days into the window.
“Well, what happens to players? When you fly in, and you’re traveling 15 hours of travel, your body needs time to recover. We got into Nigeria, had to have some time to recover on that first day and a half, then we had time for one practice, which was still when we were in recovery mode.