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Roger Milla and his Cameroon team-mates captured hearts and minds at Italia ’90 but world has changed too much for another ‘unknown’ team to cause a surprise
The globalised game means we may never see a Cameroon 1990 side again.
We all know the story. The plucky underdog, roaming around the pitch in their baggy green shirts, unknowingly creating one of the greatest ever stories that the football and the World Cup has ever seen. At the time they were almost mythical group of players, plucked from the deepest, darkest Africa, and made to play on the world stage against some of the heavyweights of the global game. But how likely is this to ever happen again? Will future World Cup teams ever be defined by a man in his late-30s, who played his football on a French-controlled island east of Madagascar that most people now still haven’t heard of, serenading a corner flag with his bodily movements?
I am, if you had not worked this out already, talking about the Cameroon team of the 1990 World Cup. With colonialism not quite a thing of the past and images from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness still dominant in the Western world’s conception of Africa, this Cameroon team were almost the perfect sporting representation of Africa as an “unknown”, as the world were more interested in why they ate monkey’s heads and practiced juju than the way they played football.
And much like the way that the Western world defined a way that African countries were “supposed to progress”, there were certain conventions that Cameroon employed during this World Cup that defied how football was “supposed to be played”. The employment of Valeri Nepomniachi – a coach whose only management experience was with a Turkmenistani club in the Russian third division who spoke no English nor French; their pre-tournament defeats to uninspiring domestic sides in Bordeaux and Yugoslavia; and of course the calling-up of a 38 year-old Roger Milla – at the President’s