Laurence Griffiths/Getty ImagesPeter Odemwingie will be playing club football while the African Nations Cup goes on

Before social media if anyone (be they in the public eye or not) wanted to share a story they had to go through a filter. Either they would call a newspaper journalist and offer a scoop or they would ring a broadcaster and propose an interview. Whichever method they chose, there would be a third party involved.

Not anymore. Now anyone, anywhere with access to a mobile phone can publish whatever they want. Just ask Peter Odemwingie. Although the Nigerian striker also spoke to the BBC about his omission from the national squad to play in the African Nations Cup in less than a month's time, his most revealing comments came when he expressed himself without any intervention on his Twitter feed.

In the space of an hour, he posted 29 times beginning with: "On my not inclusion to the eagles list I am not surprised Keshi and NFF couldn't tell me themselves. No personality!" And ending with: "A wise man advised me after 1st tweet that there r other ways to make someone look stupid. I am not interested in that, Just cleared maself."

In between, Odemwingie questioned preferential treatment of players, why Lars Laegerback was did not continue coaching the team after the 2010 World Cup and the captaincy. He reminded whoever was reading that he was voted Nigeria's player of the year during qualifying for that World Cup but did not play in the tournament, revealed a spat about practice kits and warned the football federation that he would not put up with anything further they had to say to him.

His most telling line was tinged with fury. "I sang the national anthem for ten years to be treated like this," he wrote. In short, Odemwingie is angry. He is also disappointed. The combination of those emotions can be toxic especially when armed with a direct line to the world.

In other sporting codes, players are fined, suspended and even banned when they publicly denounce the people who employ them. Even if they are not employed by the body in question and so cannot be disciplined in the traditional ways, their relationships with the organisation are strained and sometimes irreparably damaged. In football, that doesn't often happen, especially not in African football.

The country's federations have so little control over their players that anything they do is unlikely to be taken seriously. As an example, consider that in the upcoming continental competition there will be some players like Togo's Emmanuel Adebayor, who would rather represent their European club for financial or administrative reasons and the country has no claim on them. If they cannot even compel their players to fulfil national commitments, the chances of them being able to legislate what comes out on their Twitter accounts is none.

All Odemwingie may have done is temporarily written himself into the Nigerian Football Federation's (NFF) bad books. He also provided journalists with gold-dust and supporters with what he believes is an explanation.

Importantly for Odemwingie and his fans, those reasons have not passed through the keyboards or microphones of anyone else. They have not been given attempted clever lead-ins or so-called thought-provoking context. They are Odemwingie's own raw thoughts.

He was able to get out what he wanted, the way he wanted to get it out there. Some of it, particularly the bits about the training kit, may not be clear to the rest of us but maybe Odemwingie did not intend it to be. He calls it a "childish" thing and goes on to say that the NFF wanted him to play a midweek friendly instead of returning to West Brom (the old problem recurs) and asks when common sense will prevail.

Good question. Since new forms of communication spur on impulsive outbursts good old judgment makes its appearance rarely. That is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it gives those who have the option of too many voices, like professional sportsmen who can call up members of the media, the one chord they actually want. Then it is up to the readers to decide which parts of the story they take as fact, which they put down to opinion and which they will not regard as serious at all. Odemwingie has shown how that can be put into practice.

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