U-17 Word Cup Winning Coach, Sebastian Broderick Is Dead
Coach Sebastine Brodericks-Imasuen, who led the Golden Eaglets to win the inaugural U-17 World Cup in 1985 is dead.
The late Nigerian coach was on life support at the University of Benin Teaching Hospital for over a year.
Brodericks-Imasuen, 85, had been diagnosed with Ischemic stroke in December 2022 and had been receiving treatment before he took his last breath, it was gathered.
Ischemic stroke occurs when a blood clot blocks or narrows an artery leading to the brain.
The blood clot often forms in arteries damaged by the buildup of plaques (atherosclerosis).
One of the players Brodericks-Imasuen trained at the 1989 U17 World Cup in Scotland, Bamidele Oguntuashe, first broke the news before another confirmation came from Harrison Jalla, the Chairman, of the Professional Footballers Association of Nigeria Task Force through a WhatsApp post.
Jalla quoted family sources for the death of the iconic coach who had been bed-ridden for some months now.
He reportedly suffered from a stroke and diabetes.
The late coach was one of the football players who represented Nigeria at the Mexico Olympic Games in 1968 and famously scored from a free kick to win the then Challenge Cup for Bendel Insurance in 1972.
As a coach, he was the head of a three-man crew that included Bala Shamaki and Christian Chukwu when the Nigerian team shocked the world in China in 1985.
He led the team again in 1987 to Canada and got to the final before losing through a penalty shoot-out to the then-Soviet Union.
At the third attempt in the competition, his team lost to Saudi Arabia by a penalty kick in the quarter-finals.
At another time, he was the assistant to Clemens Westerhof in the Super Eagles.
He began his football career in 1956 when as a student, he featured for the Onitsha team in the Challenge Cup.
