Super Eagles head coach, Eric Chelle, has maintained that his team need to improve after Nigeria secured a tight 2-1 win over Tanzania in their opening 2025 Africa Cup of Nations Group C match at the Fes Stadium on Tuesday.

“The most important thing at the AFCON is to improve with every game. So, after we analyse the match tonight or tomorrow morning, we have to continue to improve,” Chelle said while speaking to journalists at the post match press conference.

Semi Ajayi opened the scoring for Nigeria in the 36th minute before Tanzania equalised five minutes into the second half through Charles M’Mombwa. However, Ademola Lookman fired home just outside the ball barely two minutes later to score the goal that won the match for Nigeria.

Speaking further, Chelle said that his players had a good first half but admitted they made some mistakes in the second half that the team will have to analyse. He, however, noted that win was the most important outcome of the evening and that squad was happy about it.

“We have to analyse this win because we did a lot of good things. We create chances to score in the first half. And in the second half, we gave Tanzania the chance to come back into the game. We made two mistakes. However, this is the game where we say that we are happy for the win,” the coach noted.

On the next game against Tunisia, Chelle stated “It is going to be a big game against Tunisia because they are a big team. But we have to improve, obviously defensively and we have to make more movements when we don’t have the ball so we have a lot of work to do.”

Meanwhile, in his reaction, Ajayi, who won the man of the match for his impressive performance in the game, also reiterated his gaffer’s point that the team still needs to make improvements but noted there are a lot of positives the players can take from the match. 

“There are lots of things we can improve on but there are positives we can take away from the game too. We are definitely aware of things to do to be better in terms of seeing out the game and killing teams off. We have been working really hard in training to put that right,” Ajayi said

On scoring in the game, he said, “It is always an amazing feeling to score for your country and in a game like this — to get a really good start. I was really pleased. It showed that we are one team. We cannot only rely on attackers to go get goals. I think we need to get goals from all over the team. Everyone needs to chip in if we want to do well in the tournament.”