Soccer in Sun and Shadow

The Curse of the Posts

The keeper had a face chiseled with an ax and pitted by smallpox. His huge gnarled hands bolted and padlocked the net, and his feet shot off cannonballs. Of all the Brazilian goalkeepers I’ve ever seen, Manga is the one I remember most. Once, in Montevideo, I saw him score a goal from net to net: Manga kicked from his goal and the ball went into the opponents’ goal without any other player touching it. He was playing for the Uruguayan club Nacional as a penance after having been driven out of Brazil. The Brazilian team went home shamefaced from the ’66 World Cup, where they suffered an ignominious defeat, and Manga was the scapegoat of that national disgrace. He had played in only one match. He made a mistake, got drawn out and, as bad luck would have it, Portugal scored on the empty net. That unfortunate error became such a scandal that for a long time thereafter mistakes by goalkeepers came to be known as “mangueiradas.”

Something like that happened at the ’58 World Cup, when the keeper Amadeo Carrizo paid the price for Argentina’s defeat. And before that, in 1950, when Moacyr Barbosa was the whipping boy for Brazil’s loss in the final at Maracanã.

At the 1990 World Cup Cameroon unseated Colombia, which had just won a brilliant match against Germany. The African team’s winning goal came on a foolish mistake by the goalkeeper René Higuita, who took the ball up to midfield and lost it there. The same people who like to cheer such audacity when it turns out well wanted to eat Higuita alive when he got back home.

In 1993 the Colombian team, without Higuita, crushed Argentina 5–0 in Buenos Aires. Such a humiliation cried out for someone to blame, and the guilty party had to be — who else? — the goalkeeper. Sergio Goycoechea paid for all the broken dishes. The Argentine team had been undefeated in more than thirty matches, and in each one Goycoechea was the key to its success. But after Colombia’s goalfest the miracle penalty-blocker not only lost his nickname, Saint Goyco, he also lost his spot on the team. More than one fan recommended suicide.