Five Bold Predictions Ahead of Nigeria's World Cup Opener Vs Croatia

Published: June 15, 2018

The wait is almost over. Nigeria and their Group D counterparts, Croatia meet at the Kaliningrad Stadium tomorrow for their opening game of the mundial.

No one will begrudge the patience we have all exercised after all, it is not often one watch a quadrennial event.

Perhaps, Gernot Rohr's men will do well to take a cue from Russia's 5-0 walloping of Saudi Arabia in the first game of the competition yesterday.

Make of that assumption what you wish though but here, we bring you five of the things we could witness in the Kaliningrad clash.

Super Eagles To At Least Avoid Defeat: Nigeria has lost two of her last three opening games at the FIFA World Cup, a trend stretching back since beating Spain in 1998.

Though the Super Eagles have also not been firing on all cylinders recently, we are backing them to find a way of curtailing those losses.

And oh.., Gernot Rohr has lost just one competitive game (versus South Africa) since taking over the reins of the national team!

Croatia To Dominate Midfield: When we talk of the midfield superpowers for this game, Luka Modric, Mateo Kovacic or Ivan Rakitic quickly come to mind, and rightly so.

Zlatko Dalić unarguably has a strong pool of metronomic midfielders to call upon for this game though that is not to say John Obi Mikel and his allies will not match up to anything thrown at them.

Seemingly, it looks inevitable the Croats would come out tops in this department.

A Very Minuscule Amount Of Goals To Be Likely Seen: Croatia's last two games versus African teams saw them concede once on each occasion and we might see defense superiority reign supreme for this one.

The Balkans are as solid a team to break down as the Super Eagles are too, so what do we say about goals in this one? Very likely to be at a minimum.

Wingers, Iwobi and Moses To Prove Nigeria's Likeliest Sources Of Goals: Those two make things happen for the Super Eagles and it would not come as a surprise if we see either of them create something spectacular in Kaliningrad.

Their level of creativity and drive is what very few can offer in the team.

We Could Yet See A Game Of Two Halves: It is telling that Nigeria's performances during first periods in some of their last friendly games has not been satisfactory while Croatia have not fared any better.

They crumbled to Brazil after a much better first half in one of theirs while they were made to battle back from a goal down after the intermission in the 2-1 victory over Senegal coming into this one.

We only hope the Super Eagles come off better in a game of two halves!

Emmanuel Chinaza