Sam Ibiam

Sam Ibiam
Personnel
Surname	Sam Henshaw Ibiam
birthday	April 4, 1925
place of birth	Nigeria
date of death	2nd December 2015
Place of death	Ebonyi ,  Nigeria
position	goalkeeper
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1945-1947	Calabar XI
1947-1949	Port Harcourt XI
1949-1952	Railway FC
1952–195?	PAN Bank FC
195? –195?	SCOA XI
1954	Railway FC
1954-1958	Africa Great Olympics
1958-1960	Onitsha Redoutable
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
1949-1958	Nigeria
Stations as a trainer
Years	station
	Aba XI
1965-1967	Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation
1 Only league games are given.

Sam Henshaw Ibiam ( April 4, 1925 - December 2, 2015 in Unwana , Afikpo , Ebonyi ) was a Nigerian football goalkeeper and football coach .

Known primarily as The Cat and The Black Magnet during his playing days, the player played in the pioneering days of the Nigerian national soccer team , when Nigeria was still a British colony and part of British West Africa . He is widely regarded as the first Nigerian football goalkeeper, as he also participated in the team's first official game against Sierra Leone in October 1949.

After the death of Richard Etim Henshaw on November 18, 2009, he is said to have been the last surviving player from this pioneering period around 1949/50.

Career

Start of his career and first national goalkeeper in Nigeria

Sam Ibiam was born on April 4, 1925 and began his career as a club player in the port city of Calabar after graduating from the Hope Waddell Training Institution , a secondary school , and completed his early days at Calabar XI from 1945 to 1947 and from 1947 to 1949 at Port Harcourt XI . He had his first breakthroughs with the club from the coastal town of Port Harcourt , with whom he advanced three times in a row from 1947 to 1949 to the semi-finals or final of the newly founded football cup in 1945 and was therefore appointed to the national team of his home country. Subsequently, the club, without Ibiam's participation, was three times cup winners in the following years and was also without a win in the final in 1950. At the time of his debut in the Nigerian national soccer team, Ibiam was still a player for Port Harcourt XI. As a national team debutant in 1949, he was part of an 18-man squad known as the 1949 UK Tourists who toured the United Kingdom and competed against local clubs. He put the squad on August 16, 1949 with the RMS Apapa in Nigeria and played in England against the amateur clubs Dulwich Hamlet , Bishop Auckland FC and South Liverpool . Ibiam was used in all other games except for the first game in which reserve goalkeeper Isaac Akioye was in goal.

Successful goalkeeper and first Nigerian legionnaire

After his return to Nigeria, Sam Ibiam came to Lagos , where he joined the local Railway FC , with which he was to work together until 1952. Successes with the club included a cup win in the then Governor's Cup in 1951. Nothing is known about wins from Nigerian championships, but Railways FC was champions of the Lagos League several times in the 1940s and 1950s . At that time there was no national league, but mostly regional leagues in the various Nigerian states. In 1952 he joined PAN Bank FC , another club in the capital, and immediately won the Nigerian Cup after a 6-0 win over Warri . After a short stopover at SCOA XI , he returned to his ex-club Railway FC in 1954, but soon moved to the Ghanaian capital Accra , where he was hired by the newly founded Africa Great Olympics . The association, who celebrated primarily in the 1970s some success, they took him then to 1958, before by the then Gold Coast returned to his homeland and the Redoutable Football Club Onitsha , also Onitsha Redoutable , in the Niger lying city Onitsha joined.

Career conclusion and work as a football coach

In that year he also ended his career as a national player, which had been going on since 1949, although it is generally said that Ibiam had only conceded five goals over the course of this time. His first goal he is said to have received it only after eight years on October 27, 1957 in a 3-3 draw against Ghana ; this was also the first time that Nigeria could avert a defeat against Ghana in Accra. It is also noteworthy that Dodo Ankrah , Ibiam's replacement at the Africa Great Olympics, was in the opposing goal . He played his last game for Nigeria on October 25, 1958 in a 3-2 victory over Ghana, when he won the penultimate Jalco Cup with his home country . At Onitsha Redoutable, just under 200 kilometers further north of Port Harcourt, it held him until 1960 before he ended his active career at the age of 35 and instead switched to coaching. Ibiam, who was also the first Nigerian legionnaire because of his stint at Africa Great Olympics , trained the Aba XI team from the state of Abia in the early 1960s . From 1965 to 1967 he was also the head coach of the soccer team of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation from Ikorodu . After he gave up his work as a coach due to the outbreak of the Nigerian civil war and had to leave the east of the country, he withdrew completely from football.

Last years of the often neglected old star

In 1987 he was awarded the First National Sports Award for Sports Heroes and Heroines of Yesteryear by the Ministry of Sports for his past successes during the tenure of the Nigerian Sports Minister Bayo Lawal . As before, it went largely unnoticed afterwards. This was also the memorabilia that remained with him from his time as a football player. Much, including his equipment from the UK tour, was lost when the civil war broke out in Onitsha, where he was living at the time. A year earlier he was invited there by the Rivers State Commissioner for Sports along with other old players from Port Harcourt to attend the opening of the new stadium. At the presentation of the National Sports Awards , Ibiam and the other award winners were promised cars by MKO Abiola , various governors of the Nigerian states and other important public figures, so that they could come to football games, among other things; however, this promise was never kept.

Most recently he lived alone in a bungalow in the village of Unwana near the town of Afikpo in Ebonyi state and suffered from kidney problems in the last few years before his death. In 2009 Sam Ibiam, who no longer showed any real interest in football, received a sum of ₦ 250,000 from the Nigerian Football Association , which he used for his health care. In 2011, four years before his death, Ibiam also participated in a celebrity edition of the television show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and won this celebrity edition , as did Willy Bazuaye , who also died in 2015. Ibiam died on December 2nd, 2015 at the age of 90 from the consequences of his kidney disease.

Web links

• Sam Ibiam: Nigeria's first Goalkeeper - biography of Sam Ibiam (English)
• First Nigerian goalkeeper, Sam Ibiam, dies at 90. (English)

Footnotes and individual references

1. ↑ Historical Pix; Meet Sam Ibiam, Nigeria's First Goalkeeper Who Once Conceded 5 Goals In 9 Years For Nigeria. ( Memento of the original from December 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: nationalhelm.com. Accessed January 1, 2016 
2. ^ Lifeline for forgotten national heroes. In: supersport.com. Retrieved January 1, 2016.
3. ↑ Sam 'the Cat' Ibiam dies. In: supersport.com. Retrieved January 1, 2016.