Rohr fires back ............ We Had No Creative Midfield Player - Okocha Reacts To Super Eagles' Loss (Video)

 

Austin Jay Jay Okocha

hehehehe......Nigerian football legend, Austin Jay Jay Okorocha believes the Super Eagles lost to Croatia by two unreplied goals as the team coach, Gernot Rohr played key players out of their original positions.
 

Jay Jay Okorocha yesterday reacted to the abysmal performance of the Super Eagles against Croatia at the ongoing 2018 World Cup in Russia.

 

Nigeria succumbed to a 2-0 defeat against Croatia after conceding a goal in each half in their opening 2018 Fifa World Cup encounter. Oghenkaro Etebo’s own goal in the first half and Luka Modric’s penalty after the restart condemned the Super Eagles to a loss at the Kaliningrad Stadium.

 

While analysing the match on SuperSport in South Africa, legendary dribbler Okorocha believes the team arrangement was far from perfect as there was no creative midfielder on the pitch.

 

He apparently laid the blame at the foot of the German coach, Gernot Rohr for what looked like an awful team arrangement which also affected the performance of midfield maestro, Mikel Obi and Arsenal's Alex Iwobi who is also Okocha's nephew.

 

"We didnt have a creative midfield player today. Mikel has been a great servant you know but I think his best position is sitting in front of the back four. We saw him at Chelsea. You know He had a wonderful career at Chelsea playing in that position.

And in our national team, I think at the moment, the most creative player that we have is Iwobi. Playing him on the right hand side in the national team, we are taking his strength away from him. He can play there in Arsenal because of the way they play, because of Ozil, he is a creative player.

And today the only reason why we lost this game is that we played our players in the wrong positions. We didnt get the best out of them".he explained.Head coach of the Super Eagles, Gernot Rohr has insisted that playing a three-man defence against Croatia was not the best decision.

Rohr was reacting to criticisms surrounding his choice of 4-2-3-1 formation for the 2-0 defeat to the Europeans in their Group D opener on Saturday night.
Former Nigeria captain, Austin ‘Jay Jay’ Okocha questioned the decision of the coach not to go with a 3-5-2, which has suited the team best in friendly games.

However, Rohr has argued that they did not concede in open play, so the blame cannot be on the system.
“We didn’t concede in normal play, we conceded only two goals from set pieces. This is not a question of tactics or system. Our system was okay, we cannot play with three (at the back) when there is only one centre forward.
“We played with four defenders because there were three Croatian strikers who are very strong. I was satisfied with the organisation of the team but what we missed in the game is being professional from set pieces. Each game is different. We know we can play with three centre backs but it was not a good day (Saturday) to do that,” the German told reporters.