Players and officials of the Flying Eagles team were ysterday banished from training in Mbour ahead of their semi-final clash against the Black Satellites of Ghana, at the ongoing Senegal 2015 African U-20 Championship. As stated by a source, the national U-20 team was ordered by the Aspire Academy, owners of the sports complex, to vacate the grass pitch after training for about thirty minutes. The reason behind the banishment is the failure of the Local Organising Committee (LOC) to pay for the grass pitch for participating teams to train, instead it was the synthetic pitches that were solely paid for. Having realised situation, the Nigerian side returned to the synthetic pitch to complete the exercise, the source stated. "It's sad that the LOC is failing in its responsibilities in a tournament of this magnitude. The issue of practice pitches for the participating teams ought to have been finalized and paid for," the source who craved anonymity fumed. "So, how do you expect a team playing an important game like the semi finals to train on grass when the game would actually be played on grass? For me, this is disgraceful and something must be done to correct all the anomalies." The Flying Eagles' Media Officer, Sam Audu, who also confirmed the incident, however, explained that the synthetic pitches were primarily paid for by the LOC for all teams in the competition to train. "We're asked to pay the sum of 200,000 CFA to train on the grass, however, we're not prepared to pay and we simply moved to the astro turf to train. The South Africans were here and they also trained on artificial pitch," he pointed out.
