Talking about negative publicity from western media, I was enjoying the latest edition of Football Punk, a monthly magazine about the beautiful game with attitude which talks about football intertwined with fashion, equipment, skills and chicks [www.footballpunkonline.com] when I turned to a page that had the pictures of a couple of Nigerian players in national colours. I was pleasantly surprised. However, the pleasantries immediately turned to disgust when I saw the headline: AN AGE OLD PROBLEM?
It got worse when I had the stomach to go through the article and it turned out to be an article telling the world how Nigerian players deceive the world with fictitious ages. And guess what? The article was from a forum on www.nairaland.com , a Nigerian website. According to the article, Taribo West whose official age is 35 is allegedly anything between his mid 40s and 50s. Jay-Jay Okocha is officially 36 but bloggers believe he is 39. On paper Obafemi Martins is 25 whereas bloggers believe he is 29 while Yakubu Aiyegbeni is 32, whereas his passport reads 27. The most annoying one is that of legendary Kanu Nwankwo who though 33 years old according to his passport, is allegedly 41 years old in reality.
Now this is absurd. Inasmuch as all of us know that majority of players in third world countries use ages lower than their actual years when going professional, what irks me is why must we be the ones to wash our dirty linen in public? Just like I was mad at one of my friends who rushed to send the pictures of that gory robbery incident along Lagos-Benin express way to the BBC, I was mad at all the stupid bloggers who opened their mouth to write rubbish in this internet age about our beloved stars. Such comments are defamatory, but unfortunately for the players they cannot do anything to fight this by filing legal suits because there is a defence to defamation called justification, when actually the defamatory comments are true!
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