Nigerian Nightmare: Poor Goaltending
PARIS — Goalkeepers. Can’t live with them, can’t win a World Cup without one, as Bora Milutinovic harshly rediscovered Sunday when his team--the one without Peter Schmeichel-- conceded four goals in the second round and, conse- quently, won’t be making an appearance in the third.
The critical factors in Nigeria’s 4-1 loss to Denmark at Stade de France was:
* Denmark had Peter Schmeichel, one of the finest goalkeepers in the world.
* Nigeria had Peter Rufai, one of the goalkeepers in the World Cup. Denmark has won major trophies with Schmeichel between the posts and not very much else on the grass in front of him. In 1992, almost single-handedly, Schmeichel led Denmark to the European Championship. (Almost. Schmeichel actually uses both hands when he plays for the Danish team.)
Nigeria? Well, Nigeria has 10 highly skilled players who can outrun, outjump and outshoot 90% of the players in this World Cup--and it has a goalie, fundamentally because everybody else has one.
Rufai is Nigeria’s goalie. This is not by Olympian decree by Bora; this is by default. As a soccer-playing nation, Nigeria likes to call itself the African Brazil, a tag that isn’t as outrageous as it initially seems. Brazilians hate playing goalie, too. It is a tradition born on the schoolyard playgrounds of both countries:
If you can play, you’re a forward or a midfielder.
If you can kind of play and you’re slow, you’re a defender.
If you can’t play and you’re slow and your glasses keep sliding down your nose when you sweat, you’re a goalie.
Nigeria’s game plan in this World Cup was to score so many goals, the goalie wouldn’t matter. Bora, of course, knows better--he saw what happened when he tried to coach the United States through a World Cup in 1994 with Tony Meola instead of Kasey Keller.
But what was Bora to do? He left his last real goalkeeper in Mexico when he switched jobs in late 1997, moved to Africa and forgot to pack Jorge Campos.
In the days leading up to the World Cup, Nigeria became a trendy pundits’ pick for the semifinals and beyond, because all that flashy offensive weaponry can cloud normally clear heads. Defense and goalkeeping wins World Cups--all together now, Spain, please repeat after me--which is why, deep down, Bora realized that the quarterfinals against Brazil would have been the end of the line for the Super Eagle express.
Deep down, too, Bora wishes he had the same dilemma with Nigeria in ’98 as he had with the United States in ’94. Meola or Keller? Brad Friedel or Jurgen Sommer? As his assistant coach from that ’94 U.S. team, UCLA’s Sigi Schmid, has noted, “Bora would cut off his right arm to have any one of those four now.”
Paraguay, one of the longest shots of France 98, was six minutes and one penalty shootout away from the quarterfinals Sunday simply because of the human volcano it starts in goal, Jose Luis Chilavert.
Chilavert was the Krakatoa of this World Cup--huge, massive, Campos squared--and prone to erupting at the slightest provocation, such as the Paraguayan defense surrendering a shot on goal that Chilavert viewed as unnecessary.
Dressed in foreboding black with neon yellow piping, Chilavert was impossible to miss on the pitch in Lens--which was precisely the point of the first 113 minutes of Paraguay’s second-round challenge of heavily favored France.
Through those 113 minutes, Chilavert made a staggering 24 saves, hurtling himself from one goalpost to the other, storming off his line to rattle one French shooter after another into banging close-range shots off the post or off the MasterCard dasher-board sign.
Only with Chilavert’s defense on the verge of heaving exhaustion did Laurent Blanc finally swoop in to put something in the net in the 114th minute. By that much, France lives to see the light of another round. Because had it gone another six minutes and onto penalties, Chilavert would have been snorting and grinding his teeth and a good bet to stare the quaking hosts out of their boots and out of the World Cup.
Sunday was a good day for good goalkeepers and the last day of the tournament for Rufai. After listening to all the post-match superlatives about Schmeichel, Bora refused to answer a question about Rufai, pleading, “I don’t like to make comparations.” Bora was right. There was no comparation.
