Argentina scored in the sixth minute of its 1-0 World Cup opening match victory over Nigeria last Saturday. In that stretch of time, the Argentine Lionel Messi, the game’s greatest player, had already led his team to nearly striking soccer gold three times. Argentina dominated the match up to that point, and it dominated it for the 84 minutes that followed as well. And not only on the pitch. Its coach, Diego Maradona, one of the greatest players ever, ran after the ball when it bounced out of play almost as eagerly as Messi did when it was in play. So much fanfare had been made about how Maradona’s team and Messi himself would perform, and neither disappointed. Yet somehow that wasn’t what anyone was talking about after the game. They were talking about 27-year-old Vincent Enyeama, Nigeria’s goalkeeper, who breathtakingly stopped Messi four times and single-handedly kept his team in the game and the hopes of his nation alive.
Even Messi and Maradona were talking about him. Messi called him “phenomenal”; Maradona called him “exceptional,” adding that “he was the one who made us suffer, because in football if you create chances and fail to convert then you can be punished.”
While Enyeama’s performance might have been news to many of even the most educated soccer fans, it wasn’t to those who follow the game in Israel, where Enyeama plays his club football, for Hapoel Tel Aviv. “Whoever knows Enyeama and his ability wasn’t surprised,” Moshe Harush, a sportswriter who covers soccer for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, told me. “We see this match after match in the Israel league, which is a big difference. But we all know what he can do. For a long time, everybody knows that he is the best goalkeeper ever landed in Israel, ever to play in the Israel league.”
The worldwide audience was first introduced to Vincent Enyeama, a native of Akwa Ibom, on the southern coast of Nigeria, at the 2002 World Cup, when he earned a start in his country’s final group match against England. Nigeria was already eliminated, but England wasn’t and needed a positive result to make it to the next round. At the age of 19, Enyeama not only produced one of the most memorable saves of the tournament when he deflected Manchester United’s Paul Scholes’s thunderous 25-yard strike, but he held the desperate favorites scoreless and reliant on a shock result to advance, when Argentina failed to beat the heavy underdog Sweden.
Now England has taken notice of him again. Arsenal and West Ham, whose new manager is the Israeli Avram Grant, have both expressed interest in purchasing Enyeama for next season, and they are already in competition with teams from Spain and Russia. Hapoel Tel Aviv has set his price at $5 million. That would come to the largest amount ever paid for an Israeli league player, and there seems to be no doubt that the club will get it.
“All his friends from Hapoel Tel Aviv, they already feel sorry to lose him next season,” Harush says. Led in no small part by Enyeama, the 2008-2009 Israeli Premier League’s player of the year, Hapoel Tel Aviv won an Israeli double this season: its first championship in 10 years and the Israel State Cup. The league title puts the team in next year’s Champions League, but the players know that “without Enyeama the chance to go to the group stage [of that competition] is not so good.”
Enyeama, who is nicknamed “The Cat,” for the way that he jumps after the ball, is not only an accomplished goalkeeper, he is also an accomplished goal scorer. He put five goals into the net this season, all on penalties. He is Hapoel Tel Aviv’s designated penalty taker, at all times. “Even though Hapoel Tel Aviv lead the match 2-0 or 3-0 and some other players would like to have the penalty,” Harush says, “the coach of Hapoel Tel Aviv always calls Enyeama and tells him to go and take the penalty. ‘I don’t want to hear nobody. This is your mission.’”
Enyeama doesn’t have only the support of the soccer faithful in Tel Aviv. He has the entire country’s. Every soccer fan in Israel watched Nigeria’s World Cup opener, and the next day the sports pages of every newspaper in Israel wrote only about how Enyeama had stopped the world’s greatest player, Lionel Messi, and at length, too.
But the quiet and shy Enyeama doesn’t let the attention go to his head. He humbly acknowledged that the match against Argentina was a career game for him, saying, “It would be my best possible performance playing against the best possible player in the world, so it was my best.” And, as is his practice, he deflected all the attention onto a higher plane. “My secret lies with God,” he said. “Thanks to him I was able to do what I did today as he allowed me to stay calm under pressure.”
Studying videos of 20 different Lionel Messi games probably didn’t hurt, either. But when Nigeria takes on Greece today, Nigeria will be looking for a win. To get that, Enyeama will need more support than his players gave him against Argentina. And if that doesn't happen, he may not only need to keep the balls out of the net. He may need to put them in, too.
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