Efe Ambrose is the latest Celtic player to book a place at the World Cup Finals following Nigeria’s 4-1 aggregate victory over Ethiopia yesterday.
The hoops defender helped Nigeria to a 2-0 home win yesterday in front of a sell out crowd in Calabar as the home side qualified for the finals for the fifth time.
Ambrose will be joined in Brazil next summer by Emilio Izaguirre, Fraser Forster and Tom Rogic while the fates of Georgios Samaras and Mikael Lustig will be decided on Tuesday.
Victor Moses and Victor Obinna scored the goals yesterday as the current African Nations Cup holders booked a place in Brazil where they will be confident of reaching the knock out stages.
“The first thing was to make sure we qualified,” Nigeria coach Stephen Keshi said. “In today’s game I don’t mind that we played badly as long as we qualified. We have other games were we can play beautiful football.
“There was a lot of anxiety around the players. Because it’s the last game, they wanted to qualify.
“I had to calm them down and make sure their state of mind is intact, but I knew it was going to be a little difficult for them to focus.
“I remember the same thing happened to us in Algeria in 1993 with players not being able to eat because they were anxious but we had to try to make sure we got them to calm down a bit.”
In other international news yesterday Emilio Izaguirre was in the Honduras side that lost 5-0 defeat to Brazil while in Cardiff Joe Ledley and Teemu Pukki were on opposing sides as Wales and Finland drew 1-1.