By Agboola Israel
If you follow any Nigerian wearing a faded HENRY 14 or EPL jersey, you will certainly end up at a football viewing center, where everyone is watching Data is Life ads, and arguing whether Aguero was really offside for that third goal against Chelsea.
Naija is a soccer-mad country. You can understand how important the EPL is to the Nigerian football scene by looking at a crowd in Onitsha, Ilorin or Lokoja: really, any gathering of people arguing loudly without punches is a football grudge facing the 50th debate for the day. From Gidamangoro to Port Harcourt, there is always some kind of soccer shrine, some totem to the sport, where the spirit of the game is kept alive.
Such gathering, at home or at a stadium, is forbidden in the present times. And staying at home, unlike before, holds little promise for new matches. Soccer lovers are really suffering but nobody seems to care.
The streets are dry. Before, young boys would gather, plant upright sticks in the ground, and play felele, that inflatable rubber ball. They’d play in sets and without any referees because by themselves they were enough. They resolved their soccer disputes without a Zidane head-butt. All Nigerian football sprang from those kids out on the streets and backyards, who kicked whatever could cross a goal line.
Nigeria’s first case of COVID-19 was confirmed on the 27th of February. Twenty-one days later, the English Premier League and the NFF had suspended their respective leagues.
Cue emptiness. A muted wash over the nation.
Niger was one of the first states in Nigeria to announce a partial lockdown. Bus parks were shut down. Public events scrapped. Markets emptied. The lockdown was from 8AM to 10PM. It was mostly a preventive measure, designed to save people from travelling to their own deaths.
Good move, I thought, that first evening in Bosso some weeks ago. I had come over from my school in Gidan Kwano to spend the time with a friend from church. I was sitting outside his room, on the pocked pavement, searching through Twitter for any scrap of relevant news. The streets were quiet. Nothing was moving. I read the coronavirus updates and shook my head.
Out on the street, some boys, defiant, were playing monkey post. Somebody, or something, had to stand up to the virus.
March 27: three cases in Nigeria.
Nine days later, on the fifth of April: forty-one cases.
Today, over 340 cases in 20 states out of thirty-six.
The first time the pandemic felt exceedingly real to many people in Nigeria was when Mikel Arteta was infected and the Premier League was subsequently suspended seven days later. Quaint but it’s true. I was walking home from school with a couple of friends, wandering through WhatsApp statuses, when I heard the news.
One of my friends looked up from his phone with a weird smile. “Israel. You don hear?”
“Wetin?”
“Una coach don get corona o.”
“Abeg stop that kain joke.”
“I dey talk am na! Go check Sky Sports.”
It was true. I stared at my screen while the air rushed into my mouth. Wow. Minutes later, three voice notes from friends who adored rival clubs. I clicked on one from Ridwan. I have known him for eight years now. He was sweet, kind, a bit rotund, his only real flaw in life being that he supported Chelsea.
“How far my gee? Dem talk say Arteta don get corona o! Ha! Too bad, how you wan do am now? You no go sell Aubameyang for us?”
Two days later, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Chelsea’s English wonder-kid, contracted the virus. I sent my own voice-note, rippled with ridicule. Ahh sweet-sweet revenge.
Football spawns more banter than anything else in Nigeria. We mock each other’s failing foreign clubs. Memes about Jese Lingard do the rounds. It is Ronaldo versus Messi every day. Everyone virtually ignores the Nigerian Professional Football League except for betting heads who know enough to always gamble on the home side. Any other thing other than a win for a NPFL home side is the eighth wonder of the world, a phenomenon that the referees will explain to angry home fans wielding cudgels, marching onto the pitch and singing “We no go gree!”
Otherwise football is what we all look forward to after a tiring day. It is our unifier, clichéd as it may sound. Kids gather themselves, play football and gain foot injuries. Adults watch football on TVs and gain split throats and broken hearts. Everyone eats. Everyone drinks. Tomorrow will be here again.
Even as a novel virus jumps around the world, pulling communities apart and showing the red card to whole countries, football is not dead. Not yet. The kids on my front street show that. The resilience of the Belarusian league proves it, and in all our collective hearts is a reminder that football is still around the corner; with the hope that it will turn out to be a corner taken quickly.