A mild drama ensued yesterday morning, as the players and officials of the Flying Eagles team were banished from training in Mbour ahead of their semi final clash against the Black Satellites of Ghana, at the ongoing Senegal 2015 African U-20 Championship.
A competent source hinted SoccerStar that the national U-20 team was ordered to vacate the grass pitch after training for about thirty minutes by the Aspire Academy, the owners of the sports complex.
The banishment was due to the Local Organising Committee (LOC) failure’s to pay for the grass pitch for participating teams to train, instead it was the synthetic pitches that were solely paid for.
Having realised situation, our source hinted that the Nigerian side returned to the synthetic pitch to complete the exercise.
“It’s sad that the LOC is failing in its responsibilities in a tournament of this magnitude. The issue of practice pitches for the participating teams ought to have been finalized and paid for.
“So, how do you expect a team playing an important game like the semi finals to train on grass when the game would actually be played on grass? For me, this is disgraceful and something must be done to correct all the anomalies,†the source who craved anonymity fumed.
The Flying Eagles’ Media Officer, Sam Audu, who also confirmed the incident, but explained that the synthetic pitches were primarily paid for by the LOC for all teams in the competition to train.
“We are asked to paid the sum of 200,000 CFA to train on the grass, but we are not prepared to paid and we simply moved to the astro turf to train. The South Africans were here and they also trained on artificial pitch,†he pointed out.