Super Eagles’ manager, Gernot Rohr said that there are no special plans to man-mark Lionel Messi in their final group game against Argentina in Russia.
“Of course, we all know him and we know of his quality. But we also played against some really good players in our qualification and were able to deal with them.
“We had Riyad Mahrez at Algeria, we played against Saido Mane and Senegal in a friendly, we know how to organize our defence against top quality players.
“What I can tell you now is that there will be no man-marking of Messi. We did this in the old days, even myself, but it’s not used too often these days.
“We will deal with Messi or any big player as a collective. But often you won’t be able to keep top players quiet over the whole 90 minutes,” he pointed out.
The gaffer also revealed that he had deployed scouts to monitor Nigeria’s opponents as they prepare for the Mundial.
According to him, “Like everyone else is doing it these days, we will scout our opponents. We will send scouts to watch their games.
“We have already started to analyze videos of our opponents and we will try to get as much information as possible about our opponents. But we will also monitor and scout our own players in order to choose the best squad. And we have lined up our friendly games against teams that are playing similarly to the opponents on our group.”
