Why I Didn’t Invite NPFL Stars For Sierra Leone – Rohr

Super Eagles head coach Gernot Rohr has explained the rationale behind his decision to snub players from the local league despite coming under increasing pressure.

Rohr released a list of 24 players last week with which he plans to prosecute the back-to-back AFCON qualifying matches against Sierra Leone later this month. Of the 24, only one – Ikechukwu Ezenwa – plies his trade in the NPFL.

The Franco-German tactician has, however, pointed accusing fingers at players of the Nigeria Professional Football League for being responsible for their continued exclusion from the Super Eagles set-up.

Rohr maintains that the failure of the home-based Eagles to qualify for the CHAN tournament is mostly responsible for the absence of local league stars in his squad list in recent times.

Nigeria were runners-up at the 2018 African Nations Championship, but the team was knocked out of the race for the 2020 tournament by Togo.

Rohr insists that tournament is the best platform to try out the league’s best players before they are afforded opportunities to team up with the Super Eagles.

“There are local players we also look out for, but unfortunately, we can not see them in the CHAN tournament because I always take the best of players from there, but unfortunately, we did not qualify,” the former Bordeaux manager told AOIFootball.

“We have a lot of local players as sometimes I watch their games, and I believe we can use the friendlies to test some of them and should also do a CHAN friendly to test the best legs among them,” Rohr said.