Osimhen Vs Kvaratskhella: Nigerians and bigotry, By Kunle Awosiyan
By Kunle Awosiyan
I grew up seeing football fraternity honouring talent more than goals even though goals scored separate a winner from a loser in the game.
In football game, the Most Valuable Player is not always from the winning team and the team that has the highest goal scorer may not even make it to the final of the tournament.
That is football for you, it is a teamwork where experts pick out the most gifted of the players on the pitch as the MVP.
Of course some talents had been overlooked in the past because they failed to produce goals, experts who came earlier into this game saw more than goals in the likes of the legendary Edson Arantes Do Nascimento (Pele) and Diego Maradona who became the benchmark in the search for football talents.
Pele who recently entered the Portugese dictionary to mean unique, exceptional, decoded the round leather game with not just the number of goals he scored but the special skills and persona he brought to the field.
I have seen many matches of Maradona and I stand to be corrected that no footballer had been so gifted like him, yet he was not among the rated goal scorers in football history. Except where and when he scored with the famous “hand of God”.
As much as I will pick Austin Okocha as the best in Africa going by his ingenuity, I will pick Khvicha Kvaratskhelia as a better footballer than Victor Osimhen. Of course Osimhen is a rare player and a prolific scorer but when it comes to creativity, dribbling, sublime skills, craftiness of a footballer using Pele, Maradona, Zidane, Xavi, Iniesta, Ronaldinho, Messi as standard, Osimhen does not fall into this category but Kvaratskhelia.
As good as Rasidi Yekini was and with a record of the all time Nigeria highest goal scorer, the world celebrates Nwakwo Kanu more than him. Yekini’s eye for goal was terrific but Kanu’s football intelligence is unparalleled. That is what we are talking about here. That is Kvaratskhelia.
The Georgian playmaker scored 10 league goals and 12 assists for Napoli to win scudetto while Osimhen scored 22 great goals, including the equaliser against Udinese to win the Serie A league.
However, the Serie A twitter handler preferred Kvaratskhelia as the new king of Napoli after Maradona did it for the club more than three decades ago.
The graphic by the twitter handle shows a Maradona crowning Kvaratskhelia instead of the goal scorer, Osimhen.
This triggered allegation of racism against Serie A and comments by Nigerians to discredit the league and the Napoli midfielder Kvaratskhelia.
So many irritating comments by Nigerians. Someone even writes, “that kwarashila no dey pass ball to Osimhen. Them give the person wey no sabi ball the crown as them give Tinubu for Naija”.
It is smelly to always think that whatever that does not go our way is an act of racism or ethnicity. When are we going to stop this idea of ethnicity and stop exporting it abroad in the name of racism. The laughable and interesting part of the story is that the various ethnic groups in Nigeria that commented on Osimhen never mentioned where he had come from; either he is Yoruba, Igbo, Edo, Fulani or whatever. They all spoke with one voice as Nigerians fighting for the rights of another Nigerian abroad in a foreign club. Laughable, they allege racism and back home they allege ethnicity.
No doubt, Osimhen is a world class, having broken the record of George Weah as the African highest goal scorer in Serie A.
He is great to have become the second Nigeria international after Obafemi Martins to win Serie A league. He will go on to win the golden shoes at the end of the season by God’s grace and may win the African footballer of the year but he must also build the personality and the face that football wants to see.
