Oshoala Blames Falcons' Olympics Ticket Loss on Absence of First-team Stars

Absence of first-team stars cost us Olympic ticket–Oshoala

By Solape Lawal-Solarin

Super Falcons’ striker, Asisat Oshoala, has blamed the absence of first-team players for the country’s failure to qualify for Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

Christopher Danjuma’s charges bowed out of the race for qualification to Ivory Coast at the Agege Stadium in October thus, ending their Olympic dream.

However, Oshoala has opened up on the botched Olympic campaign, stating lack of experience and too much youthful players in the squad cost the team.

First-team players like Desire Oparanozie, Rita Chikwelu, Halimatu Ayinde and Onome Ebi were left out of the country’s Olympic Qualifying series for administrative reasons.

“In the Olympic Qualifiers, we did our best to qualify but obviously, we didn’t have our best team,” Oshoala told Goal.

“Our best team didn’t play the qualifying games. I was there and we missed a lot of players from the Women’s World Cup who didn’t feature in the Olympic qualifying matches.

“I think that if we are going to be building a team and really wanted to go to the Olympics, the players that we had were not experienced enough.

“There were a lot of young players, maybe they were trying to build the team but it thinks experience counts a lot in games that involve two legs and then it’s a knockout.

“A lot of experienced players were not part of the team and it actually added to the reason why we didn’t qualify.

“We also had a lot of younger players coming into the team and the coach trying to build around them. We were so unlucky not to qualify.”

Punch