It is an amazing competition put together by the organisers; I commend them for it. I am from the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency’s (NIMASA) team and I recall it has been a long time we participated in this competition. This year, we decided to put all our strength, zeal and enthusiasm into the game but unfortunately lost at the finals. I attribute our performance to the short time we had to prepare for the competition; we were not informedearly enough and needed more time to put our team together. I can assure you that this is not what NIMASA can offer because I know we can do better than this. I want to urge the organisers of the competition to make it a point of duty to make the awareness of the competition known to agencies/organisations like two or three months before the competition starts so the participating teams would have enough time to practise properly before the competition kicks off fully. Also, the awareness will make the agencies or organisations prepare their players by sending them out for practice, getting pitch for them to do their practice and also camp the players like a day before the competition kicks off.
The Maritime Cup competition has been going on for a long time now and this is the 10th year.I must commend the organisers for this amazing feat. Incidentally, I am the Chairman of the team managers; we have been battling,fighting and struggling to sustain the integrity of the competition because of the excitement that a competition of this nature generates. There have been several tendencies by participants to win at all cost and we are trying to stamp that out of the competition by ensuring that we screen people. It has to be only workers of a particular agency that play in the competition. We have had incidents where mercenaries were used and also had to contend with petitions questioning the eligibility of some players but we are confronting it and the tournament is growing gradually. Industry awareness is also growing about the categories of people we want in the tournament. We have always said that this tournament is not aimed at picking players for the national team but to build friendship, networking and to strengthen recreational relationship amongst the stakeholders in the maritime industry. I urge the organisers to make sure that only eligible workers of the participating companies are allowed to take part in the competition.
The competition has been fantastic. To me, it is all about friendship and the agencies of the maritime sector coming together to know themselves and to promote the maritime industry. The competition has made people who have not heard about maritime, to know more about it. This competition has become an event that most people in the maritime sector look forward to every year. I commend the organisers of the competition for promoting such a good environment for us to relax, compete and become friends. I urge more agencies under the maritime sector to be involved in the participation of the competition; it will be a good thing if more teams join in the subsequent maritime football competition. In addition, I urge all stakeholders in the maritime sector to support the organisers so the competition can grow beyond what we know it to be. I am sure this competition has come to stay and it would be a force to reckon with in the maritime sector.
It is a brilliant initiative. It has fostered unity and harmony between the various maritime agencies and within each agency, it also helps them develop team spirit which is critical to moving forward.What the organiser of the competition need now is plenty of support because this competitionmeans a lot for inter-agency collaboration and team building spirit. The organiser should extend this competition to other sports.
It is a good initiative but more awareness concerning this competition should be carried out. It should begin like two to three months before the competition kicks off. There is a need for industry stakeholders to support this competition, make it bigger and colourful. The standard of the competition so far, has been quite high. For me, the unique selling point of this competition, is the friendship between workers of other agencies, people that I have never in life, thought of meeting. I also want to urge the organiser to place adverts on radio and television stations. This would help in bringing together all the agencies under the maritime sector like the Nigerian Shippers’ Council and so on.
The 2018 competition is unique in the sense that certain negative experiences recorded in the past especially as regards mercenaries, have been eliminated. I hope that in the subsequent competitions, there will be more teams from other agencies participating, apart from the regular agencies like Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Customs and so on. I also want to thank the organiser for coming up with thisinitiative, right from the 1st to the 10thyear. I know it will go on forever; I want to appeal to maritime stakeholders to be of support to the organisers so the competition can be much more popular than it is now.
I have seen tremendous improvement over the years and more agencies have joined the competition. The organiser is trying its best when it comes to awareness but they still need to do more to get more agencies in the maritime sector involved. This competition is getting tougher every year; this is the time maritime stakeholders need to join hands with the organiser to support the competition. This will enable it meet up with the international standard. Also, the organiser needs to work on the welfare package provided for the players. That can be effective in encouraging participation especially when more awareness is created.
It has been an interesting competition; with time, will move from its current location to inter-state. This competition has created a lot of relationship between agencies and made employees relax and get to know themselves better in settings that are not work related. I commend the organiser of this competition for their persistence in driving the Maritime Cup up to this point. Surprisingly, this is the tenth edition. It gets better every year and I know very soon, it will turn out to be the best competition ever in the maritime industry.
The 2018 competition was fun all the way. It has revealed that outside the vigorous work in the maritime sector, there are still people who are dedicated to sports. The competition has brought unity, cooperation and friendliness among the stakeholders in the sector.I feel the organiser should work on getting a standard field and create a lot of awareness to draw more players from other agencies into the competition.
The competition from the beginning to the end wasinteresting, exciting and the music in the background, made it all fun. This is the 10th year; it can only get better, I really enjoyed the final match because it was between NPA and NIMASA who are the two foremost regulators in the industry. The organiser has been doing a great job right from inception. All I can say is that more awareness should be done. It would not be a bad idea if the Navy, Nigeria Police and Marine Police join subsequent competitions. I am sure this competition is going to be one of the foremost competitions in Nigeria sooner than expected.
It is a good initiative. Sports is one activity I know that unifies people, especially football.It doesn’t matter where you are from when it is football; everybody comes out. I see this as an opportunity to showcase the maritime sector of our nation. Many people don’t know what maritime can offer them in business because, they don’t know anything about it at all but organizing a competition such as this one will let them know that there is a sector called maritime. This will make people curious about maritime. I appeal to maritime stakeholders to support the organiser so the competition can be televised every year. By bringing in local stations to show the competition live, the competition can quickly go global.
This is my first time of attending this competition. It encourages unity, cooperation and friendship between agencies in the maritime sector. It is a way of creating relationship through networking between employees of different agencies. I commend the organiser for the initiative in the first place. This is the kind of competition the federal agencies in the sector like NPA and NIMASA should support in every way they can and make it a global event
There has really been a lot of improvement in the competition compared to when it started. I commend the organiser for not allowing mercenaries among the players this year.I view the Maritime Cup as annual event for bringing employees from different agencies to relate and network with one another. It is time for the agencies to come out en-masse to support the organiser because it can be challenging putting all this together. When there is enough support from all the maritime agencies, the competition will become bigger and colourful.