“We call him Iniesta!” Nigeria’s
striker Taiwo Awoniyi beamed
from ear to ear when telling
FIFA.com about his teammate and
playmaker Musa Yahaya. “When
he holds the ball in the middle
and looks up, you better be
moving because he wants to get it
to you.”
Yahaya is quiet and introverted.
He needs to be coaxed into an
interview. He’s shy, like a lot of
15 year olds, and he wraps a wide,
bashful smile around himself like
a blanket when talking about
football.
This taciturn nature, a profound
modesty and humility, are
qualities often associated with
Spain’s Andres Iniesta, the man
Yahaya’s mates can’t help but
compare him to. Mostly though,
Yahaya is like Iniesta because he
can tear defences apart in a split
second. He can score from
distance, or send in a killer ball
from deep. He can dribble past
you like you’re not even there.
It’s a gift from God, I think.
Yahaya
Nigeria’s Yahaya on his trademark
feint
“The guys started calling me
Iniesta a few years back,” said
Yahaya, who grew up hard in in
the industrial northern city of
Kaduna, following up on a face-
to-face interview via email, a more
comfortable platform for the
No11. “Pretty soon everybody was
calling me Iniesta.”
There are worse players to be
compared to. Iniesta’s name
would be in almost everyone’s
top-five list. He scored the winner
for Spain in the FIFA World Cup™
final in Johannesburg in 2010,
has won six La Liga crowns and
three UEFA Champions Leagues
with Barcelona and is, generally, a
revered figure in the game.
Few may know, Yahaya among
them, that Iniesta got some of his
first tastes playing in a Spain
jersey right here in UAE, when he
helped La Roja to the final in the
2003 U-20 World Cup. He had a
full head of black hair and he
scored two goals.
Interviewed back then, Iniesta
sounded a little like Yahaya
sounds now: in awe. “That there
might someday be kids out there
with a poster of me on their walls
is just too much to contemplate,”
a teenage Iniesta told FIFA.com a
full decade ago in Abu Dhabi.
“I like Iniesta as a player because
he’s just so skillful and I pray I
can be like him one day,” said
Yahaya, who has four goals here
at the U-17 finals in a Nigerian
team brimming with talent and
enthusiasm.
Playmaker and scorer in one
Yahaya is a hard player to define
simply. He exists somewhere
between a traditional playmaker
and a deep-lying striker. His
assists have been crucial to
Nigeria’s success in reaching the
quarter-finals, but so have his
goals. “I like to score,” he said, a
predictable sentiment for a player
with such a wide array of
attacking options playing in such
a forward-thinking side. “But the
role of playmaker, just behind the
strikers, is something I love. I love
to have the ball at my feet and to
look up and play my mates in with
a pass.”
His is a hybrid role. And Yahaya
has a particular move in his
arsenal that’s left opponents
completely unable to cope. “It’s a
gift from God, I think,” Yahaya said
about his special move, where he
dips his shoulder before bolting,
like a lightning strike, the other
way with the ball. It’s a simple
feint, but that’s no comfort for the
poor defender, who’s left rooted
to the ground like the desert palm
trees of UAE. “It just comes
naturally to me and I don’t really
even plan to do it.”
He twice thrilled the crowd with
his divine feint in the Round of 16
rout of Iran in Al Ain. Midway
through the first half, Yahaya left
Iran captain Majid Hosseini for
dead, going left and laying in a
diagonal ball for Samuel Okon to
score. In the second half, he
pulled the same trick again, this
time rounding his marker to the
right and hammering the ball
inside the far post from distance.
Yahaya, shy and faltering off the
pitch, becomes assertive and
forceful on it. And like his
nickname-sake Iniesta, he dreams
of world glory through football. “I
want to be famous for playing
football,” said the ready-smiling
attacker, whose ambitions are
fuelled by neither selfishness nor
vanity. “I grew up a certain way, in
a certain background,” he
concluded, carefully avoiding
words like ‘poverty’ and
‘hardship’. “I want to use football
to help my family be better.”