In late October 2021, just months before the Africa Cup of Nations in Cameroon, I met Gernot Rohr for an interview in Munich, Germany.
The trainer was in town to attend a ceremony by Bayern Munich in honour of his great uncle Oscar Rohr, a formidable striker for Bayern in the 1930s.
Rohr was preparing for the Afcon in January. As he watched a game between Bayern’s U18s against Hoffenheim, Rohr stole moments to talk with Amaju Pinnick, the Nigeria Football Federation president, on the phone. They discussed bringing Odion Ighalo back into the squad to strengthen the attack.
Even in faraway Germany, Rohr wore an Aiteo baseball hat, he had a sense of pride in his job as Nigeria manager. After all, he was the longest-serving manager in that position in Nigeria’s history.
He had qualified the team for the 2018 World Cup with a game to spare in a group that included Algeria, Cameroon and Zambia. It was unprecedented in recent Nigerian football history that we had qualified for a World Cup without the need for calculations and permutations.
We even had the luxury of dropping three points and three goals after the team used an otherwise suspended player in their final game against Algeria. Under Rohr, we defeated reigning Afcon champions Cameroon 4-0 in Uyo. It was a blistering thrashing, one of the best that I have watched a Nigerian team play.
Such was the strength of the team that Rohr built in his time.
But like everything in Nigeria, there were always the naysayers and those who believed that the coach was never good enough. Pinnick even said that Rohr was sacked because his team struggled to win matches during the 2022 World Cup qualifiers. I laugh in retrospect. I hope Pinnick can see from where we are today that he and his crew of decision makers were all a bunch of jokers, and they owe us an apology.
Yet, after Rohr, we failed to qualify for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar as perennial interim coach Austin Eguavoen bungled the two play-off games against Ghana. He would later also add to our current listless 2026 World Cup qualifying debacle when he stepped in once again after the sack of Finidi George.
But I digress.
I think Nigeria owes Gernot Rohr an apology for the way the NFF and the press treated him. Pinnick claimed that the coach had lost discipline of the team. He even told me during a phone call how Rohr allowed the players’ camp to be filled with visitors ahead of their games. But he could never deny Rohr’s ability to get results. In Yoruba, we say that it is awa wi, plucking excuses in the air to give the dog a bad name.
Pinnick’s board did their best to sully the image of Rohr so that they could justify his sack. But like the phoenix, Rohr has risen again to show us why you can’t put a good man down.
Two years after he departed from the Nigerian job, he took a role with neighbouring Benin. Many Nigerians ridiculed his going to a lowly team like the Squirrels, who had not been to an Afcon in more than a decade. They said that if Rohr was truly that good, he would have gone to bigger countries to work and that he would never see a team like Nigeria to manage again. That Nigeria did him a favour by handing him a team with immense talents to pad his CV.
But Rohr has now justified his managerial acumen, not that he needed to prove to anyone that he was good. After all, he had seen success as a manager in club football with Bordeaux, which he led to the UEFA Cup final in 1995 and garnered extensive experience with key jobs around the continent.
Under Rohr’s watch, Benin defeated the Eagles under Finidi 2-1 in Abidjan. They now sit atop Group C of World Cup qualifying, two places ahead of Nigeria and could qualify for their first World Cup if they draw with Nigeria in Uyo on Tuesday.
Yet, this was a man derided by many in the football establishment and their friends in the media. They controlled the narrative to turn the country against him.
However, Rohr has never said a bad word about Nigeria despite the way he was let go. All the comments he made after his sack, after the failure to qualify for the 2022 World Cup despite his having built the side well, after the Round of 16 exit in Cameroon – Rohr has always been magnanimous. He always felt that Nigeria had so much talent to become a top contender.
On Tuesday in Uyo, Rohr would have another chance to show why he is a top-class coach. From what we have seen so far through this qualifying series, Rohr’s Benin will push the Eagles to the brink. And if they win, it will be sweet revenge for sacking a manager who once gave his all for Nigeria.
A draw will see Benin qualify for their first World Cup and show the world how wrong Pinnick’s NFF was.
But if we manage to win despite our shambolic performances so far, we will have faced a worthy opponent, a man who deserved better than the way he was treated.
