₦airaland Forum

BilliBaron:
i support they can't dictate what name you choose for your state, but saying they're trashing ur town. I don't accept that Do You know that 80% of criminals and Ritualist in Enugu state today are from Anambra and that Anambra have carried igbos in his shoulder is laughable. No doubt, Anambra State is Good But 90% of pple that made Anambra what it is today are pple frm other state expecially Enugu pple. You can go to Onitsha Main Market, Ose Okwuodu, Iweka E.t.c you can count how many Anambarian is there doing business. The only thing Anambra has contributed mostly in is soiling the name of Igbos. So don't make it look like Anambarians are ahead of every Igbo state 'cause it's impossible.

Basically, what you are saying is that 90% of the wealth in Anambra state were created by Enugu and Ebonyi people....I dont believe you believe what you just wrote. Probably drunk or something.

Baroba:
The idiiiiot called Omambala is full of crap, these are paupers who ride on famous individuals achievement in there various states.. Honestly folks like him and the codeine addict Nonso needs to be ignored..

Let him keep ridiculing Ebonyi folks small Ebonyi boys such as Tekno and Runtown can easily buy out his whole family.. anummanu..

Guy , behave like a civilized man for a second. I am happy Tecno and Runtown are doing great for themselves but that is not my problem. You are beclouded with emotions thats why you cant reason properly and that is why you will continue to lose argument to superior minds.
Nwa Omanbala kam bu and even if you are richer than me I will rather be a poor man and remain onye Anambra....Anambra nwelu nnukwu aka...Ezi afa ka ego!

MarijuanaLORD:
Shut ur mouth there

Carrried ndigbo on which dirty shoulders


Anambra be constantly soiling ndigbo with human sacrifices in okija shrine na una drug psddlers na una, thiefs na una, discrimination una, kidnapping una so shut up

Ok, we are ritualists when we are bent on securing our state but when you are ready to brag about Igbo top achievers you forgot Anambra are ritualists. You are a hypocrite and parasite.

I will not jump into the mud with you and disrespect my father land Anambra but I will protect it with the last drop of my blood!

Call Omanbala all the bad names in the books and I will still be proud of my father land till eternity!!

Omanbala Erika!

Lajet:
Afonja Muslim you are so happy because of this news

You are a disgrace to your father's house. You don't have the wisdom to read between the lines because you are probably too busy on FB watching immoral women or BBN and filling your mind with crap..
Onye na ekwu bu nnukwu nwa Idenmili. Agu anaro amu okpu!

tohpahz:
Shut that thing u call a mouth

And this is how you wish to make a point.....Don't be foolish by half.

emezuo17:
This is one of the most unintelligent comment I have read on this forum from a supposedly Igbo man on an Igbo thread, with people like you and your thinking, why wouldn't other tribes insult us and call us names on nairaland, I am so ashamed of you. Mind you iam not from ebony, but iam a full blooded Igbo man doing well for himself, no Anambra man has carried or is carrying me on his shoulder.

Atuolu omalu omalu, mana atuolu ofeke ofenye isi n'offia! Onwelu ndi Igbo ji bili.

legitnow:
God will place me exactly there and u know it.

Igbo need to move forward, we cannot do so with trash talk and behaviour.

WE have bigger social, economic and regional problem than street name.

Aside, u need to stop getting over emotional over nothing.

You are weak!!
Run off.

Craziestgirl:
Lol, who made you the governor's spokesperson?

I am a true Omanbala.
EOD

Craziestgirl:
The question a casual observer would ask is,
how many other similar streets did he rename?

We don't owe you any explanation.

legitnow:
Obiano should return the name back to Abakaliki.

I am from Anambra South and would not want trivial matter as street name to come between us and our Ebonyi brothers.

May God never place you in a leadership position in Anambra....You are not a true blood!

okenwaa:
The chief mumu has spoken!!

We have heard you.
Now ,run along.

Anambra is very welcoming to all Igbos.

The Vice Chancellor of Unizik is an Imo man.
The Anambra state chief press secretary is from Enugu.

But these people will never allow us hold a post in their state....We are not fools!

After the creation of the new Anambra the Enugu state government sacked every Anambra person working in the state civil service...Guess what , Anambra didn't cry about it.

truefact:
We you and where u from, but evil will never prosper in anywhere... Whatever u come with will remain with u and remain where u come from... Evil people everywhere

My name says who I am...Its not a new Moniker. The strongest Anambra man alive!

Zonacom:
I think Umahi is overreacting. Anyone familiar with the street in question, knows that " Club road" is a better name to "Abakiliki street". It's got nothing to do with any discrimination. If I were Obiano, I would name another street Abakiliki to cool tempers

Great idea, name another street and let Umahi rest.

Umahi you cant dictate to us how and what to name our street and nobody is looking down on you ,so, stop,feeling inferior. Ebonyi people has not contributed anytbing except littering the whe space. Go to Umuoji and see how these people are trashing our home town.

An advice for Umahi, if you say you are the fastest developing state then pull your people out of Anambra and they can go back and enjoy the divided of your governance. Do not soil the name of Anambra...Anambra has singlehandedly carried Ndi Igbo on our shoulders. Biko, keep quiet.

raindodger13:
I suggest we use this formation for the 3-5-2. It slightly similar to the formation The Good Joe suggested a few weeks ago but I modified it a little. I put Balogun in the middle because he seems to struggle against players with pace. Iheanacho is on the left because I noticed he likes to shoot with his left foot, but he and Moses can switch positions if its most suitible for the team.

NVM

raindodger13:
I suggest we use this formation for the 3-5-2. It slightly similar to the formation The Good Joe suggested a few weeks ago but I modified it a little. I put Balogun in the middle because he seems to struggle against players with pace. Iheanacho is on the left because I noticed he likes to shoot with his left foot, but he and Moses can switch positions if its most suitible for the team.

Solid line up

AIG07:
Etebo is a beast in the Midfield.

Nnaa, where did you find the match. I beg, I need the link

AIG07:
Watching Croatia VS Nigeria again.

Where ?
I can't find it anywhere.

joseph1013:
THE WITCH AND THE SUPER EAGLES
by Leon Balogun

My sister’s best friend’s mom had a best friend, and she was the witch.

She could read auras, or some crazy nonsense like that. I was 19 years old when I was told about her. I was trying to become a professional soccer player in Berlin — I didn’t have time for nonsense. But I had this issue … I was injury prone. Every year I felt like I would take one step forward and two steps back in my career because of the injuries. My sister, who is 13 years older than me and also my best friend, had an idea: The witch. Maybe witch is a bad term. I’m not sure. But she was a little spooky.

When my sister first pitched me the idea, I sort of rolled my eyes, like, Yeah … I’m sure she’ll know what’s wrong with me.

“No, Leon,” she’d say to me, “She sees things.”

“Fine, fine. Let’s give it a try.”

Let’s meet the witch.

She was a middle-aged Russian woman. She didn’t look like much of a witch, or an oracle for that matter. Her eyes walked up and down me as soon as I entered the room. My eyes darted around. She started to talk to me and my sister. It was about nothing in particular really, but I think she was studying me — my energy. Her first diagnosis was that there was an hole in my aura. I was like, Alright, well, anybody could have guessed that.

She said, “It’s on your right side.”

“The hole in my aura?”

“Yes.”

That’s where I had a scar from a bad right-shoulder injury. She had no idea about it, and she had never seen me with a shirt off … she just, felt it, I guess. Now she had my attention.

Then — and I’ll never forget this — she really blew me away.

“Four or five years ago, you lost a person very close to you, but someone who you didn’t completely know, either.”

I don’t think I said anything. She went on about how all people have someone like this in their lives, whether they know them or not. Someone who, no matter the strength of your connection, you will feel connected to — your soulmate, in a way.

She said, “Is this true, Leon?”

“Yes, my grandma.”

https://cdn.theplayerstribune.com/uploads/649ed230-d8357ae4-328f-45e1-819a-b0db084e9967.jpg?width=1000

I was amazed. I hadn’t thought about my grandma that much since she passed when I was 16 years old. But, this lady was right. My grandma’s death had a huge effect on me, and I had never even met my grandma, who lived in Nigeria. That’s the part that was wild to me. My sister didn’t know anything about my reaction to grandma’s passing. This woman, though, she saw it. She told me I had to heal my soul, my heart, before I could become the player I wanted to be.

After we left, I didn’t completely understand if my experience with her was successful. The most important thing that came out of that day was that it got me thinking about my grandma. When I got home, my mind went straight back to the day my dad told me the news.

Because I had never met her, my dad didn’t tell me right when it happened. He actually waited a few days — that’s how distant my relationship was from her. She only spoke Yoruba. So when we talked on the phone when I was little, my dad would try to translate for us. He had never taken me to Nigeria, for reasons he didn’t make clear to me, and I only ever saw photos of my grandma.

When my dad told me, he pulled me aside in our home. I have this vivid memory of the feeling — like, this terrible, terrible feeling of sadness. I crawled up the stairs, sobbing my eyes out. I cried for an hour. My mom had to come to my room and ask me what was wrong … she couldn’t understand why I was so sad, either.

I think, what I knew at a young age was that my grandma represented a part of my life that I didn’t completely understand. I was mixed race. My mom was a German, my dad Nigerian. I was different than the other kids. And I knew that my grandma, and Nigeria, had a lot do with it.

I now wanted to understand more about that part of my life. And because of a witch, I knew how important that part of me truly was.

My dad used to walk three miles every day before school when he was growing up in Nigeria. I knew this because he never let me forget it. It was one of a handful of stories he would tell me about his childhood. He moved to Germany in 1966, learned the language, got his diploma and met my mother. He was the blueprint for immigrants. He made it sound easy — being a foreigner who looked different — but I knew it wasn’t. Because even though Germany is a progressive country, there is that group of people, especially in sport, who still lurk around waiting to knock you down if you’re different.

I met one of them when I was playing U-16 in Berlin, in 2003. I had given up on my dreams of being Thierry Henry or Ronaldinho, so I was playing at center back. The other team had this huge striker. He was bad news. I played really well, and I kept him in my pocket. We were up 1–0 at halftime, and as I was walking to the locker room, the striker kicked the ball at my head. It missed me by about an inch. Woosh. I turned, and he was yelling at me. He was calling me the n-word, using other racial slurs.

Nobody did anything. There were people all around us, and nobody did anything. After the game, while we were still at the park, I told my dad about him kicking the ball at me.

“Leon, you must always be calm. You’re smarter than they are. You’re better than they are.”

Then I told him what the boy said to me. And that, for the first time in my life, was when I saw my dad lose his cool. He had this look on his face. I told him I wanted to go home because Mom said she was making a nice dinner.

“No, we have to fix something.”

https://cdn.theplayerstribune.com/uploads/cfa66c8b-72bf6182-c4ba-4886-86d6-ca82342296f3.jpg?width=1000

So we waited in the parking lot for the boy to come out with his parents. They did. And my dad let them have it.

“Hey, how can you raise your kid like this? Do you know what he said to my boy? We all come here to play football, and you lost, and that’s the game. But your son is 15 — he’s 15! — and he acts like this. I hope that you can one day fill his heart with love, instead of hate.”

Their back-and-forth went on for awhile, and the other parents weren’t very nice. But I will remember what my dad said forever: Love, instead of hate. He was very upset in that moment, but he used empathy over rage. And I began to understand, little by little, how he made being an immigrant look so easy. I think because my dad worked so hard to integrate into society in Germany, it gave me the opportunity to do the opposite and connect with my Nigerian roots.

I never supported the German national team, mostly because I thought they were arrogant and their football was boring to watch. Even in 2006, when Germany hosted and the whole country had World Cup mania — I secretly cheered for them to lose. Because I was a kid, and I was rebellious. And because, even though I felt in my mind that I was just as German as all the other kids, a lot of people didn’t see me like that.

I was always asked, “Where are you from?” Or, “How long have have you been here?”

I would think to myself sometimes, Maybe I was meant to be Nigerian.

Even after I overcame some of the injury issues I had as a teenager and began playing regular minutes in the 2. Bundesliga and Bundesliga, that thing — the part of my soul that I had been told to heal all those years ago — was still missing from my life. In 2014, I was coming to the end of my contract with Fortuna Dusseldorf. I wasn’t sure where I would go next. There was uncertainty in my life, and from time to time I would think of the witch. What did she mean, “heal my soul?”

One night in March, my phone rang. It was a Nigerian number … it was Stephen Keshi, the Nigerian National Team manager. I was sweating as soon as he introduced himself. I wanted him to say the words I had thought about for so long. He spoke for awhile about how he wasn’t totally familiar with me, but he liked how I played.

Then he said it: “I would like to invite you to be a Super Eagle.”

Those words … they meant so much to me. It meant validation for every step of my footballing journey. It meant happiness for my family. Most of all, it meant an opportunity to go to Nigeria.

And that … that was everything to me.

https://cdn.theplayerstribune.com/uploads/49bba59f-balogun_quote-card.jpg?width=1000

When I told my dad the news, he was skeptical. “Are you sure it was the coach?” he said.

And he had a point. I don’t want to speak poorly about the people of Nigeria, but there are some that are real scam artists. They spoil our name. I think that was a part of why my dad never took me back there.

“Yes, Dad, it was the coach. I even listened to his voice on YouTube right after to make sure it was him!”

He warned me about some of the things I could encounter in Nigeria. It wasn’t quite the celebratory phone call I had played out in my head, but that was my dad, always preparing me. But he was proud, I could hear that in his voice. I knew, as much as I understood about myself, about my father, I would learn even more on this trip.

My first impression of Nigeria was probably same as that of any person who has lived in Germany his whole life: Man, it’s hot — heat like I’ve never experienced. I flew down with Anthony Ujah, a striker playing for Koln at the time. He helped me prepare for the trip a bit, too. Tips on what to do, how to act, all that stuff. When we stepped off the plane — the craziest thing was that people knew who I was. Some smiled and asked for photos. I couldn’t believe it. Just as I knew that in Germany I would always be seen as black, I assumed that in Nigeria I’d be seen as another white guy on a business trip. But they knew me, they were happy for me. Maybe I was meant to be Nigerian.

We landed in Abuja, the capital city. We were there for a few days before training started. When we drove to practice that first day, I was listening to music, headphones in. “Nobody Knows” by August Alsina was playing. I like that song because, as somebody with a little fame, people sometimes seem to forget that I go through things, too. As I was listening, I saw a boy on a skateboard on the street. He had a disability. He had to sit on the board and use his hands to get around — something you would never see in Germany. And I just started to cry. I think, because I had seen some of the poverty in the city — in this beautiful city, with wonderful people — that it just sort of put things into perspective for me. It made understand how fortunate I was to grow up in one of the world’s greatest countries, to have the family I did. It was a humbling few days, and that boy’s problems made mine seem so inconsequential.

https://cdn.theplayerstribune.com/uploads/5927726e-gettyimages-966588870.jpg?width=1000

It was a such an important trip for me, such a great trip. I felt a sense of … healing. I felt like I was connecting with a part of me that had been lost — or better yet, never truly found — a long time ago. I love Nigerian food; I love the culture. Everyone is always playing music, laughing … trying to have the best time. I felt at home. And I understood that I could have two homes.

I want to make both of them proud in Russia at the World Cup. Because Germany gave me this opportunity to have success with Nigeria. It is my footballing heritage. I get that. But when I wear that Super Eagles kit … it feels so good. And when we beat Zambia in October 2017 to punch our ticket to Russia, it felt amazing. I remember the final whistle, our stadium in Uyo erupting. I fell to my knees in tears. John Obi Mikel, our captain, came up to me.

“No, no, you don’t get to cry. You don’t get to cry. We’re going to Russia!”

We’re going to Russia. It still feels surreal to say. I just can’t wait.

I know when we get there and I hear the national anthem, I’ll feel that much closer to my family, to my two homes, to my grandma.

And that, more than anything, is going to make the World Cup incredible.

https://storage.googleapis.com/www-theplayerstribune-com/uploads/8b8afc99-leon-balogun-signature-black.png
Leon Balogun
NIGERIA

Source: https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/leon-balogun-nigeria?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=worldcup18&utm_term=Balogun

Respect Leon.
What a thought provoking piece...No wonder ,he plays with his heart.

Now ,every team knows our weakness is set pieces and they will exploit it for every 90 minutes and see if we dont crack at some point. Rohr should hqve fixed this problem a long time.

And how can these guys play like their feet were cut off?? This are boys that has played in some of the biggest stage in world football but all of a sudden they cant even create a single goal chance for 90 whole minutes....Its very disrespectful to their careers and embarrassing to the nation. Everybody knows Shehu is shaky but he went ahead and started him. He should have made his changes before the second half started.

Rohr the friendlies you said doesn't bother you are over ooo. This is the WORLD CUP!

I still cant believe what just happened between Croatia and Nigeria. How can Rohr be this stubborn and still gather the temerity to defend it?? This man has no respect for Nigeria....All the friendly matches you played should have served as a learning curve but you didn't learn jack. You used this formation for qualifier but this is THE WORLD CUP ,Mr. German tactician!

I dont want to insult you but better fly straight to Germany if you fail to win the next game. How can you keep using a system that has failed so many times??

Ighalo is strong and skillful but he is not a scorer...I want that formation that defeated Argentina,nothing more. Mikel need to sit behind Iwobi...Mikel is spent anyways even if he lifts the world cup he still needs to go. Emotions of Nigerians are in the line

Did the super eagles of Nigeria actually lost this game 2 goals to nothing ?
I find it hard to believe we played without believe, no bit no spirit and over 170 million Nigerians are behind you. This is very depressing.

As for Rohr ,if this team didnt reach semi final he must be fired!
I am very very disappointed

Rohr is too archaic for me. Shehu is technically deficient but this old man no wan hear

Is it true Mikel is playing from defensive midfield ?

klexycole:
Guys could this be the real line up??

What is Shehu doing in that line up ?

TheSuperNerd:
Did you just say Tactics and "everything" going on in camp? You wanna sell us abi? Bia.... Odenigboaroli is that you? Or is this a Croatian who don hijack this acct and is trying to steal some info on our team? Kolewerk!

Identify yourself now!

Nnaa, I am running out of patience. Almost every football analyst thinks our team is crap and we can't even beat Croatia nor Iceland...chai, alu melu.

The thin pain me nobi small, e pain me. I want Super Eagles to teach these Europeans "egwu mgbede101"

This place is so boring ,I want camp news ,pictures of Eagles in training ,formation,tactics and everything going on in the camp....I want camp gist ,NOW!!

komekn:
Not to burst the bubble of excellence with regards to his talent.

He is 19 if he was so exceptional and outstanding as you put it Villareal would have him in the first team.

But what it says he is a work in progress hopefully we will see him in La Liga sooner than later.

Well, he is joining them for pre season training.

Next!

Obiano is bent on cleaning up Anambra but I want more.

I want more and more trees.

Standard public toilets.

Clean paved roads without sand dunes.

Better drainage system.

Grasses and green every where.

Every house must knock down their fences and plant trees and grasses

Every house must remodel their exterior and repaint it.

I want a squeaky clean, green and beautiful Anambra in 10yrs.