Garba Lawal, a member of Nigeria’s historic 1996 Olympic gold medal-winning football team, has told PUNCH Sports Extra that the Dream Team’s triumph in Atlanta remains the closest feeling to winning the World Cup, describing the achievement as the pinnacle of his football career.
The 52-year-old insisted that the achievement cannot be compared with anything else Nigerian football has produced.
Nigeria fielded a golden generation of players between 1994 and 1998 who could compete with any team in the world, reaching the World Cup on both occasions but falling short at the knockout stage each time.
In between those campaigns, however, the Olympic Eagles won football gold at the 1996 Atlanta Games, a feat Lawal rates above what a World Cup run could have delivered.
“It is similar because it was special. We were the first African country to do so before Cameroon did it in 2000,” Lawal told PUNCH
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