Nigeria’s U17 football team coach, Fatai Amoo has expressed hunger for the title as the Golden Eaglets prepare to face Ivory Coast’s Baby Elephants in the final of the WAFU Cup in Lome, Togo on Sunday.
The Golden Eaglets beat Burkina Faso in the semi finals to reach this stage of the competition after qualifying for the knockout rounds in fortuitous fashion.
Nigeria needed group rivals, the Ivory Coast to beat Ghana by two clear goals to progress to the last four and the Elephants obliged with a 3-1 victory over the Starlets.
Amoo said the win over the Burkinabe owed a lot to painstaking pre match preparations.
“We want to appreciate our opponents today, the young boys of Burkina Faso,” Amoo said. “Before the game, I knew that they have the players to win this game which motivated our boys (the Golden Eaglets) to believe we can do it and try our best to get the win which we did.
“We saw one or two of their previous games. They won against Benin and they played a draw against Niger. We studied them very well.
“They are very good from the flanks, putting in good crosses with good players who can head the ball very well. They have a very good midfield combination and we knew we had to work on our defenders.
“So that is exactly what we did and we were able to keep them away from heading the ball and shooting the ball to our goal.”
Amoo however knows that victory over the Ivoirians in Sunday’s final will be anything but uncomplicated having lost 0-1 to the same team in the preliminary stages of the competition.
The Ivoirians have won all three games played so far in the competition and are overwhelming favourites for the title.
The Golden Eaglets have however secured a place in the finals of the U-17 Africa Cup of Nations scheduled for Morocco from March 13-31.
