KEHINDE FAJOBI
The Nigerian Football Federation, NFF, has given explanations on why the Under-20 Women’s national team and officials overstayed at the Istanbul Airport on their way back from the U-20 Women’s World Cup in Costa Rica.
In a statement on Wednesday by the NFF General Secretary, Dr Mohammed Sanusi, there were a number of factors that resulted in the delay, including transit visa issues.
According to the statement, “The NFF did not book the team’s tickets from Costa Rica; FIFA did. FIFA also did not envisage the hitches that saw the team delayed for more than three hours in Bogota, and another one hour in Panama. By the time the team got to Istanbul, the flight to Abuja had left.
“Our officials pleaded for compassionate transit visas so as to take the players and officials to a hotel inside the town, but this was not possible as they were informed that Nigeria had been removed from the list of countries whose citizens were issued visa-on-arrival in Turkey.
“The airline then took the team to a sleeping area at the airport and gave them tickets to have meals every five hours. This situation has nothing to do with NFF, who had made arrangements to receive the team in Abuja before the complications in travel arrangements.”
Sanusi said that before the team departed from Nigeria, the NFF had implored FIFA, to speak with the Embassy of Germany to issue transit visas to the team to enable them travel through Germany but “this did not happen”.
He also made clarifications on the issue of body wear, saying, “The players were handed three sets of green jerseys and two sets of white jerseys, several house-wear types and training jerseys. The players opted to wash only their jersey top (no other stuff) because when the first set of body-wear was sent to the laundry people at the hotel, it returned with some FIFA and NFF badges at the front and names at the back peeled by the machine.”