Nigeria's Vincent Enyeama: A rare African goalkeeping star

A quarter of an hour into the World Cup group match between Nigeria and Argentina, Lionel Messi’s face broke into a wide grin. He paused momentarily and shook the hand of Nigeria’s goalkeeper Vincent Enyeama. The two men were sharing one of the moments of mutual appreciation that regular duelers in elite sport would recognize, like Nadal and Federer after an epic rally. Here we go again, they seemed to be saying.

Messi had not forgotten a vivid World Cup encounter four years earlier, when Enyeama, with a performance of captivating athleticism and serenity had kept out shot after shot from the then World Footballer of the Year. That day, in Johannesburg, Argentina won their group match against Nigeria 1-0. But for Enyeama, Messi alone might have scored three or four.

In Porto Alegre last week, Enyeama made two smart stops to deny Messi in the first 15 minutes, which was why the two men took their three-second time-out to clasp hands. By the end of the game Messi had added two goals to his collection of four from the tournament, but Enyeama had accumulated several more saves and added to his reputation as one of the best in his trade, particularly in the one-against-one contests with a striker that occur more frequently in modern soccer, with its emphasis on high lines of defense and quick counter-attacks. Nigeria lost 3-2, but both teams progressed to the next round, where Enyeama’s Nigeria will meet France on Monday.

In the France team, Africa's finest goalkeeper faces another set of admirers. Enyeama, 31, plays his club football in France, with Lille, and in the last season, he produced some exceptional numbers. At one stage, as Lille — a club that operates on a fraction of the budget of big-spending competitors Paris Saint-Germain and Monaco — propelled themselves towards their third place in the final league table, Enyeama went through a sequence of more than 17.5 consecutive game hours without conceding a goal. “He is one of the pillars of the team,” said Lille head coach René Girard, “and an inspiration.”

Enyeama is also unusual for being an African goalkeeper operating at the highest rung — Lille have qualified for the UEFA Champions League next season — of European club football. African players star in many of Europe’s top teams, but scouts and coaches recruiting in Africa tend to be looking for forwards and powerhouse midfielders.

“European clubs can still be a bit limited in what they think of as a 'typical' African talent,” said one talent-spotter, who works for a English leading club in West Africa. “They want powerful, fast forwards or strong midfielders.”

The best-known African stars of the 21st century have been strikers like Cameroon’s Samuel Eto’o and Ivorian midfielder Yaya Toure. Enyeama, despite maintaining high standards for Nigeria’s national team for over a decade, has had to be patient in his climb up the club ladder. He established himself as Lille’s No. 1 only last August, after stints in with Israeli and Nigerian clubs. By contrast, the services of his international colleague defensive midfielder Mikel John Obi was already the subject of an aggressive battle between Chelsea and Manchester United when the player was just 17.

A generation ago, before the scouting of talent in Africa became a significant priority for the sport’s leading clubs, some of the most admired Africans working outside their own continent were goalkeepers. In the 1980s, the Cameroonian Thomas Nkono joined Espanyol in Spain — where few players from sub-Saharan Africa played — while his compatriot and contemporary Joseph-Antoine Bell, played in goal for French clubs, Bordeaux and Olympique Marseille. Zimbabwean international Bruce Grobbelaar, a showman of the profession but also a spectacular shot-stopper, was part of a successful Liverpool team in the 1980s.

Nkono, who now works as a coach at Espanyol in Barcelona, said he and Bell had their own rivalry to thank for encouraging them to raise their standards. “We were different sorts of goalkeeper, but for many years we were competing for one place in the national team, and that motivated both of us,” Nkono said.

The experienced French coach Claude Le Roy, who has worked with six different West African national teams including Cameroon, believes Nkono and Bell overcame obstacles that still set back the development of goalkeepers in Africa. “People have found it hard to believe Africa could produce good goalkeepers because of the conditions,” said Le Roy. “The kind of surfaces they were playing on made it hard to train, with stones, and bottle tops all around.”

West Africa now has more centers with good pitches than there had been when Bell and Nkono were developing their skills, but an aspiring goalkeeper will typically play his early soccer on untrustworthy fields. “That can help sharpen reflexes,” argues Nkono, “but the essence of good goalkeeping is consistency, and making sound calculations, looking at angles, and making sure you limit the possibilities a striker has in certain situations.” His own reputation, he acknowledges, was for the spectacular. “Maybe that was typically African in my era,” said Nkono. “Grobbelaar had it, too. I enjoyed matches against him when Cameroon played against Zimbabwe.”

Unbeknown to Nkono, when he played at his first World Cup with Cameroon in 1982, he inspired an Italian schoolboy, watching the tournament on television. Gigi Buffon, who went on to win a World Cup as Italy’s goalkeeper, named his first son, Thomas, after Nkono, and has formed a friendship with his former idol.

Enyeama has a significant following, too, in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country — and, evidently, also the full respect of Messi, probably the most popular player of his generation. Enyeama was the last of the goalkeepers playing in this World Cup to let in a goal, having kept two clean sheets in Nigeria’s first two games. Messi knows just how hard he had to work to penetrate the Nigerian stopper’s defenses.