“I joke about it with people here in the U.S., we have less days than a college preseason to prepare for the World Cup and it blows my mind,”-Waldrum
Head Coach of the Nigeria national women’s football team, Randy Waldrum, has expressed deep worries over the poor preparations of the Super Falcons ahead of next month’s FIFA Women’s World Cup to be jointly staged in Australia and New Zealand.
Waldrum who doubles as the University of Pittsburgh women’s soccer head coach bared his mind during a podcast interview with PSN’s John Krysinsky.
Mixed emotions
The American coach while admitting to being excited to be leading the most populous black country, Nigeria to the World Cup said he is equally unhappy that all is not well with the Super Falcons barely 30 days to their opening match at the World Cup.
He said: “Many years ago when I got into coaching, I have always dreamed to take a team to the World Cup so I am excited that this opportunity presented itself and we qualified for the World Cup… the flipside is that I know we are not prepared the way we need to be, I have been really frustrated in recent months and in particular in recent weeks with the Federation (NFF) for the lack of support in so many different levels.”
Though Waldrum admitted a lot of logistical planning would have been required to see the Falcons’ have the best of preparations, he noted the World Cup didn’t just come suddenly hence proper preparation should have been mapped out for the Super Falcons.
“I joke about it with people here in the U.S., we have less days than a college preseason to prepare for the World Cup and it blows my mind,” the Super Falcons coach stated.
Waldrum, who claimed he was frustrated to the point of contemplating skipping the World Cup, revealed that a 10-day camp was actually agreed on to take place in Nigeria before the Falcons fly out to Australia to round off their preparations.
However, for inexplicable reasons, the exercise was cancelled by the NFF meaning he can only send training programmes to players and hope they adhere to it as the professionals that they are.
The Games
Nigeria will play Canada, co-host nation, Australia and the Republic of Ireland in that order in the first FIFA Women’s World Cup finals to have 32 countries participating.
Despite the gloomy picture, Waldrum is hoping his ladies can still do themselves and the country proud.
He hopes the Falcons can get it right from their first game against Canada before facing Australia who are the hosts and would be fired up by the home crowd.
The best outing at the Women’s World Cup for nine-time African champions, Nigeria, was in 1999 when the Falcons made it to the quarter-final
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