Early surprises..and..Missing Amodu

A look at the top Euro leagues reveals the following unbeaten teams - Barcelona, Juventus, Man City and Newcastle. No typos there. Eleven games into the season and Newcastle Utd are unbeaten and sit third on the Premiership table. The Toon army also has the best defence in the league. Up front, Demba Ba has supplied the goals and already has two hattricks. I watched them this weekend thinking they might stumble against Everton but the fact that they held on to win impressed me. Their next three games are against the two Manchester teams and Chelsea and how they fare in those games will be an indicator of what their season may become.
Dropping down a division and Southampton have taken the Championship by storm. It's not very common for a newly promoted side to be this dominating but the Saints have come marching in. I like the way they've gone about winning games by scoring goals for fun.
Levante was my top surprise up until the last couple of games when they led La liga. Back to back defeats have however brought in a dose of reality and it will be interesting to see if they can bounce back.

Missing Amodu

Joni Mitchell couldn't have said it better - Don't know what you've gone till it's gone. Nigeria's failure to qualify for next year's Nations Cup must make the country regret letting Amodu go last year. Amodu qualified the country for two World cups - 2002 and 2010 but never had the privilege to take any of those teams to the actual tournaments. In both those years he took the team to third place at the respective ANCs which was deemed not good enough and he was subsequently sacked. Now we can't even make an ANC. Shocking!! It's a pity nobody "consulted" me before the NFA hired Keshi. I would have told them Amodu is "your man", he can get the job done.

All this ex-players-turned-coaches are gradually proving to be not good enough and only time will tell if Keshi can deliver. For me I'm going to hide my head somewhere and relive Amodu pulling off the great escape in Sudan. Here's a man who led the team to an unbelievable 4-nil away win. Now that's the kind of coach we need. We just don't get away wins these days. Oh well what's on the telly this weekend; International football ... Euro playoffs (palm rubbing)