Sports
Chairman of the League Management Company Shehu Dikko has said the proposed January 13 date for the kick-off of the 2019 season of the Nigeria Professional Football League would remain unchanged despite the uncertainty surrounding the Super 8 Play-offs of the Nigeria National League.
The Super 8 was scheduled to begin on January 3 but the league body wrote to the Nigeria Football Federation for a shift in commencement date to January 5.
Also, with only one of the eight teams participating in the play-offs in Aba, the commencement of the league looks unlikely.
However, Dikko, who spoke on Channels Sports, said the NNL play-offs would not affect the LMC’s plans to start the league on January 13.
He said, “The NNL have made their plans. I think they want to start on January 5th to finish on January 8th or 9th. They said because of the holidays they are giving the teams time to arrive. Everything around that end is being sorted. It will not affect the start date of the new NPFL season (January 13).
“We will get it done and we can start the league. We have learnt our lessons from what happened in 2018 and we will see how we can avoid the mistakes going farther. At the end of the day, Nigerian football will reap the benefit from it all.
“A lot of crises happened last year but everything is coming back to normal. We will learn these lessons and build going forward. There are a lot of things that need to be done, to make the league better. We need to focus on those issues. We hope everything will turn out as planned and at the end of the day, all these crises will be for the best.” – Punch
– Jan. 4, 2019 @ 11:25 GMT |
Tags: insists Dikko NPFL will start Jan. 13
