At the turn of the 2010s, Iffy Onuora was job hunting. Thoughtful, articulate, and with bags of experience as a journeyman striker in the Football League, Onuora would theoretically make an ideal candidate for a coaching position, having retired from his playing career in 2004. He even boasted the top coaching qualification in European football, the UEFA Pro License, then only one of only 111 coaches in the world to have it. His only opportunity to prove himself as a manager, however, had come in a solitary season at Swindon Town, after which he was shunted aside in favour of Dennis Wise. He went on to have stints in caretaker charge of Gillingham and Lincoln City; in September 2009, the latter club sacked him and Peter Jackson, whom he worked alongside as assistant manager, and he had been out of work since then.
“I’d gone for an interview with an academy in Nigeria,” reminisced Onuora, during a phone conversation in mid January, “and there were several people on the interview panel. It was done through the LMA - there were some gentlemen there who had set up an academy in Nigeria, and obviously with my family background that was appealing.” (Iffy was born in Glasgow to Nigerian parents). “I didn’t get the position for one reason or another, but there was a guy I got to know subsequently called David Emegi. When they gave me some feedback a few days later, he kind of said ‘look, I’d like to stay in touch, I have one or two other things, are you happy for me to do so?’ And I said yes, as you would, but actually didn’t think an awful lot of it cos you kind of hear that quite a lot these days. Whether anything happens is another matter.”
On this occasion, however, something did happen. That something would take him to the second largest country in Africa, and one of the poorest in the world. It would lead to a ten month odyssey of trying to marshal a football team on a shoestring budget, that had been banned from international competition for the previous two years, into taking on players from the richest leagues in the world. He would also have to instil some semblance of timekeeping into them, and not become the only professional football manager in recorded history to be sacked over a cow related dispute. At least on that final front, Iffy Onuora‘s spell as Ethiopia National Football Team manager was not a success. But it left him with some extraordinary stories to tell.
