National U-17 men’s team, Golden Eaglets, will begin their WAFU B U-17 title defence in Ghana on Thursday (today) against old foes, Burkina Faso, the team that prevented them from reaching the FIFA U-17 World Cup in Indonesia last year.

Led by coach Nduka Ugbade at the last WAFU B tournament in 2022, the Eaglets beat Burkina Faso 2-1 to win the title but the Burkinabe prevailed when it mattered most at the 2023 U-17 Nations Cup in Algeria, beating Nigeria 2-1 in the quarter-finals to deny the five-time world champions a World Cup ticket. Although it’s a new crop of players on both sides, the little bit of history between them will put revenge in the minds of the players as they begin another journey to the 2025 Nations Cup as well as the expanded 2025 World Cup in Qatar.

In March, the FIFA Council announced that the U-17 World Cup will be enlarged to 48 teams and staged annually rather than biennially, as part of the governing body's unwavering commitment to young football.

Under 2013 World Cup-winning coach Manu Garba, the Eaglets have cleared the first hurdle of passing the necessary MRI test, with Garba exuding confidence in the team's quality despite having had his roster cut by failures in the same test prior to leaving Nigeria.

"We are pleased with the results. "Having the entire squad to prosecute the tournament puts our minds at ease," Garba told NFF reporters.

“The players have been responding to training. The weather is similar to what we had in Abuja before we left. Our primary objective is to get one of the two tickets from here to the Africa U-17 Cup of Nations. We will focus on the matches one at a time. For now, we are focused on our opening game against Burkina Faso on Thursday (today).”

For the time being, we are concentrating on our first match against Burkina Faso on Thursday (today).

According to the team's media officer, Francis Achi, one of the players from the last squad, Simon Cletus, has been assigned the duty of captaining the team.

The Eaglets' game against Burkina Faso will take place at the Ghana University Stadium, Accra, at 4pm Nigerian time, before they face Niger Republic on Sunday at 7pm Nigerian time and Togo on Wednesday by 5pm Nigerian time.