Nigeria's most capped player in history, Ahmed Musa is confident of victory ahead of the national team's crucial 2022 World Cup qualifying match against Cape Verde at the Teslim Balogun Stadium in Lagos.

The former Leicester City and CSKA Moscow winger wants the Super Eagles to score an early goal to put pressure on the opponents.

Nigeria have no room for error in their bid to progress to the playoff round of the 2022 World Cup qualifiers, with only two points separating them from Cape Verde.

Musa underlined that the Super Eagles will not repeat their past mistakes that saw them surrender a four-goal lead to draw with Sierra Leone in a 2021 Africa Cup of Nations qualifier before conceding in the last minute to lose to Central African Republic in the World Cup qualifiers.

Speaking at Monday's pre-match press conference, Musa said : "We know how all Nigerians love football, like the other day as she mentioned we lost the game so we don't have to repeat that mistake.

"We have done the mistake twice so the third time we don't have to do that because we know the importance of the game and we the players know the importance of the World Cup.

"Every player wants to be in the World Cup, if we don't win this game we are out, we have a lot of players who have not been to the World Cup so everyone wants to be in that tournament.

"We just have to go for ninety minutes, score an important goal in the first half and in the second half we can finish the game, and then we have qualified to the next round."

Africa's most successful team in World Cup history in terms of points accumulated, Nigeria have qualified for six of the last seven World Cups, reaching the second round on three occasions 1994, 1998 and 2014.

Igho Kingsley