Maduka Okoye Reveals His Biggest Regret As Super Eagles Goalkeeper

Super Eagles goalkeeper, Maduka Okoye, hasn’t forgiven himself for committing a mistake that led to the team’s exit from AFCON 2021.

During the tournament in Cameroon, Maduka Okoye was the Super Eagles’ first choice goalkeeper and the team looked extremely promising as they finished the group stage undefeated.

In the round of 16, the Super Eagles faced Tunisia who finished in third place in their group but got beaten by just a goal courtesy of a goalkeeping blunder from Okoye.

The mistake cut short the Super Eagles’s promising journey in the tournament and also drastically reduced Okoye’s influence on the team.

Things got so bad for the 24-year-old Udinese goalkeeper that he was heavily trolled on social media by Nigerian fans and wasn’t invited to the national team ahead of AFCON 2023 in which Nigeria finished second. He is finally back in the team but as a second fiddle to Stanley Nwabali.

In an interview with Oma Media, Maduka Okoye said: “At that moment, I told myself I should have done better. It pains me till today, to be honest.

“You could see it was a mistake because I had to keep the ball out of the goal. If I want to play at Inter Milan, then I have to do better in such situations.

“I’ve been training hard, improving in the last two years because I don’t want things like that to happen again.

“Mistakes happen, last week, Manuel Neuer, who is one of the best, made a mistake. It’s part of the game, and it was hard for me as a young boy to go through it after it happened.

“I’m not just talking about what I read on social media, it’s more about the feeling of letting your teammates down, your family down, and letting your country down.

“At this stage, I’m not even reading the nonsense on social media anymore. Some people still talk badly about Cristiano Ronaldo despite his achievements.

“People will always say something bad about you. I know that I didn’t do good in that situation, and I know that I let my teammates and my country down in that situation.

“And I’m still to this day unhappy and sad about it, and I wish I could do differently, but it happened and I learned from my mistake.”