The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) on Wednesday declared that the inability to secure transit visas led the players and officials of the U20 Girls National Team, Falconets, to overstay at the Istanbul Airport.
It would be recalled that the team had stayed 24 hours at the airport in Turkey on their way from the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup.
Making the clarification in a statement, the General Secretary of NFF, Dr Mohammed Sanusi, maintained that there were a lot of factors that led to the delay the players experienced at the Turkish airport.
The statement read: “The NFF did not book the team’s tickets from Costa Rica; FIFA did. FIFA also did not envisage the hitches that saw the team delayed for more than three hours in Bogota, and another one hour in Panama. By the time the team got to Istanbul, the flight to Abuja had left.
“Our officials pleaded for compassionate transit visas to take the players and officials to a hotel inside the town, but this was not possible, as they were informed that Nigeria had been removed from the list of countries whose citizens were issued visa-on-arrival in Turkey.
“The airline then took the team to a sleeping area at the airport and gave them tickets to have meals every five hours. This situation has nothing to do with NFF, who had made arrangements to receive the team in Abuja before the complications in travel arrangements.
“The players were handed three sets of green jerseys and two sets of white jerseys, several house-wear types and training jerseys. The players opted to wash only their jersey top (no other stuff) because when the first set of body-wear was sent to the laundry people at the hotel, it returned with some FIFA and NFF badges at the front and names at the back peeled by the machine.”
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