How heart surgery nearly scuppered Nigeria's World Cup

News emerged from FIFA headquarters in Zurich that the country would forfeit their final 2018 World Cup qualifying match against Algeria as a result of fielding defender Shehu Abdullahi.

Abdullahi was supposed to be suspended for that game, after picking up his second yellow card of the qualifiers in the game against Zambia. The 24-year-old picked up his first yellow card in the preliminary round, away to Swaziland two years earlier in November 2015.

That decision meant the original result of the game, a 1-1 draw, was chucked out, and Algeria were awarded a 3-0 win.

One of the first questions panic-stricken Nigerians asked was how the decision would impact World Cup qualification. To their relief, it did nothing, as the Super Eagles had already secured qualification prior to that game.

So the punishment was largely academic. But it was close call. If this had been a neck-and-neck situation, Nigeria would have set an unwanted record of being the first country to be thrown out of the World Cup after qualifying.

With the major bullet dodged, the next question was about how exactly such a potentially monumental error happened. So begins a tale of a series of unfortunate events.

First, there was a failure to understand the regulations. Team officials assumed, incorrectly, that disciplinary records from the preliminary rounds were wiped away for the group stages.

"Traditionally, yellow cards issued in previous rounds of the qualifying race are cancelled going forward, but the principle did not apply for the latest series," Ademola Olajire, NFF's Director of Communications said in an emailed statement.

This led to a major oversight, according to NFF Vice President Shehu Dikko.

"When the draws for the group stages were made, the technical staff assumed the cards from the preliminaries would not count going forward and didn't take proper records," Dikko told KweséESPN.

"Indeed, throughout the qualifying series, Shehu (Abdullahi) has never been counted as being on a yellow even by the match documents.

"We are always made aware of players on yellow card and we normally have meetings before games with the players to tune them up not to take second yellow in order not to miss the next match.

"We even did with Mikel, Victor Moses, Ogenyi Onazi and Leon Balogun before the Cameroon game but at no point since the group stage started had Shehu's name appeared on this list in any match."

Now, this is where the story takes an intriguing turn. Despite the oversight, this embarrassing situation could still have been avoided. After the Zambia game, FIFA sent their customary notice informing the NFF that Abdullahi was ineligible for the next game.

But! This email was sent, not to the official NFF email account, but to the technical officer in charge, where previous emails had been sent.

According to Dikko, this is standard practice with FIFA and the NFF: "Usually, on issues like this FIFA departments communicates desk to desk with counterpart departments, officer to officer. For example we are doing the FIFA Connect seminar now, and all communications prior to the seminar were between our desk officer and the FIFA Connect desk officers."

Unfortunately, this meant that when the FIFA email came in, the officer in question was in hospital undergoing emergency heart bypass surgery, with no access to his email account.

Because the majority of the NFF email communication is web-based (although the official account listed on the FIFA website is info@thenff.com, communication continues to go to a long-established alias) nobody else had access to his email account. And that is how that very critical email was missed.