Legendary ex-international football star, Mutiu Adepoju, who is popularly known as ‘The Headmaster’, was at the COPA Coca-Cola coaching clinic not just to watch from the sidelines, but stopped by in his training shoes, to motivate the young football players with drills and inspirational words at the training clinic in Ibadan.
The 2016 COPA Coca-Cola U-15 tourney which continues to toughen up, is now at the regional group stage with some of the young COPA Coca-Cola footballers in Ibadan representing their various states, Ondo, Lagos, Ekiti and Ogun state after emerging as the champions from these respective states to strive at the 2016 COPA Coca-Cola Western region group.
Adepoju who earned the nickname of ‘the Headmaster’ for scoring quite a number of goals with his head during his time as a footballer, was also joined by the former Shooting Stars FC player, Babatunde Odubola, who joined him to boost the players’ morale. The two experienced footballers jointly trained the footballers on several drills, as well as with on-and-off field lectures
Speaking of the efforts of Coca-Cola to impact the lives of young people in Nigeria through football, Marketing Director, Coca-Cola Nigeria, Patricia Jemibewon while speaking on behalf of the brand said, “Coca-Cola strongly believes in the potential of Nigerian teens and we are well aware that one of the greatest passions of these teenagers is football, so we wanted to come up with a way to provide sport education and development for them.”
The ex-international footballer, Adepoju who won the 1994 Africa Cup of Nations with the Nigeria National team, praised the Copa Coca-Cola vision. He said, “After many hours of training with these kids, I would say Nigeria has a lot of talented footballers and thanks to Coca-Cola for helping the country nurture these talents, as well as helping the kids to realise their footballing dreams.”
At the end of the match, on day 3, Rockford College, representing Lagos came out of the group unbeaten with 9points and will now head back to their state where the 2016 COPA Coca-Cola National finals will take place.
Seven other champions await the highly tactical Ikorodu boys.
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
