Soccer

Nigerian Soccer Captain Blames Loss On Ghanaian Black Magic

We’ve all heard some wacky excuses from athletes and coaches following a shoddy performance or questionable loss, but this one might take the cake.

Nigerian soccer captain Kingsley Udoh chalked up his team’s 2-0 loss to Ghana last Sunday in an Under-23 game to the fact that the Ghanaians used black magic against them before the match.

According to Udoh:

“We had to dress up for the game outside the dressing room because they scattered ‘juju’ (objects of black magic some believe can cause all kinds of harm) everywhere in the room and we didn’t want to touch anything. … The whole situation affected some of my teammates and we could not play our usual game.”

His teammate, goalkeeper Theophilus Afelokhai, on the other hand, took a more … rational … approach, blaming his defenders and the deafening noise in the stadium for the goals he conceded.

Well, at least he’s honest.

If you ask Udoh, though, he’s “not making excuses for [the] loss”:

“We were not in the match because some of us were not able to handle the horrific scenes that we saw when we entered the dressing room … we saw charms and imagine the kind of feelings or fears that could generate for young chaps like us.

“There is more to how the Ghanaians attained this win than by playing good football. We are a good team which they also know but on that day, some players I felt were good could not play well. Juju may not be working in sports but the fear of it could disorientate some people and I felt some people lost it to fear because of what they saw in the dressing room.”

This isn’t the first time voodoo arrangements reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project have made their way into team locker rooms. For instance, just last summer this abstract display of sustenance and bats appeared in the Philadelphia Phillies‘ clubhouse. However, in this case the design was rumored to have been coordinated by none other than the team’s own Chase Utley, in an effort to break out of his slump.

[h/t Larry Brown Sports]