WORLD CUP ’90 : Cameroon Will Start at the Top : Soccer: The Lions’ goalkeeper will be on the spot against defending champion Argentina and its star player, Maradona.
Joseph-Antoine Bell is expected to take on the greatest challenge of his career tonight: trying to keep Diego Armando Maradona and the rest of the Argentine team scoreless in the opening match of the 1990 World Cup.
Bell is Cameroon’s No. 1 goalkeeper and, as such, will probably be the team’s key player when it faces the defending world champion before 83,000 at Milan’s San Siro Stadium and a worldwide television audience.
Opening games are generally low-scoring affairs in which both teams try not to lose rather than to win. This one could be different.
For one thing, Argentina is eager to quash rumors that its players are over the hill and that Maradona, for all his talent, is incapable of rising to the heights he did in Mexico four years ago. On paper, Argentina vs. Cameroon is a walkover.
On the other hand, Cameroon showed in Spain in 1982 that it should not be taken lightly. Then, the Lions, as the team is nicknamed, were unbeaten. They held both Poland and Peru to scoreless ties and also tied eventual World Cup winner Italy, 1-1. Only a poorer goals-for average than Italy cost Cameroon a place in the second round.
The hero in 1982 was another goalkeeper, Thomas N’Kono, who parlayed a series of excellent performances into a lucrative contract with Spanish club Atletico Espanol. Bell was in Spain, too, in ‘82--but on the bench.
The rivalry between the goalkeepers is strong. Bell, 35, from Mouande, felt he was ignored in 1982 and set out to prove that he was even better than N’Kono. In 1984, he got his chance.
In the African Championship that year, N’Kono was the starting goalkeeper against Egypt and Togo, then found himself in the middle of a club vs. country wrangle. Espanol and Cameroon both needed him at the same time. Espanol won, and Bell stepped between the posts for a crucial match against the Ivory Coast.
Bell shut out the Ivory Coast, 2-0, was superb in a semifinal victory over Algeria--in which he scored the winning penalty kick in a shoot-out after the teams had gone scoreless for 120 minutes--and was equally brilliant in a 3-1 victory over Nigeria in the final as Cameroon became champion of Africa for the first time.
After a showing like that, Bell could hardly be ignored. He took over as Cameroon’s No. 1 goalie, and helped the country cement its place as the most powerful African soccer nation of the 1980s. With Bell in goal, Cameroon finished second in the African Championship in 1986 then won again in 1988.
On the club level, Bell, a flamboyant figure with a flair for the dramatic, has been equally successful. In 1979, he helped Union Douala of Cameroon win the African Champions’ Cup--scoring the winning goal on a penalty kick in the process. In 1982, he helped Africa Sports of Abdijan win the Ivory Coast national title, then turned professional and signed with Arab Contractors of Egypt, winning both the Egyptian Championships and the African Cup-Winners’ Cup.
Having done all he could in Africa, Bell moved to France in 1985. There, playing for Marseilles, his excellent goalkeeping and habit of racing the length of the field to celebrate whenever his team scored made him a popular figure.
Marseilles was a power in the French League while Bell was on the team, but a dispute with the club’s multimillionaire owner, Bernard Tapie, in 1988 led to a parting of the ways. Now, Bell plays for Bordeaux.
A large number of Cameroon’s players play with European clubs, and the national team was in some disarray earlier this year when it failed to defend its title in the African Championship. N’Kono, 34, was back in the nets for that series in March and, once the team had been eliminated, he berated his teammates and the Cameroon Soccer Federation.
“We are a joke,” N’Kono said. “Our preparation was a farce. Unless something drastic happens, we will make an embarrassment of ourselves in Italy.”
Another veteran of the 1982 World Cup team echoed that sentiment. Roger Milla, who also played in the defunct North American Soccer League, blamed the country’s soccer officials. “The whole way we manage things needs changing,” he said.
Bell, N’Kono and Milla, 38, are all on Cameroon’s squad in Italy, where the Lions have the unenviable task of playing Argentina, the Soviet Union and Romania in the first round. The games against the Soviets and Romanians will be played in Bari on the Adriatic Coast.
No matter which goalie Cameroon’s Soviet coach, Valeri Nepomniachi, decides to start (and the odds are it will be Bell), he will face three of the world’s top scoring threats--Argentina’s Maradona, the Soviet Union’s Oleg Protasov and Romania’s Georghe Hagi.
As to its own scoring potential, Cameroon relies largely on the talents of midfielder Andre Kana Biyik and forward Francois Omam Biyik. The action tonight could all be at the other end of the field, however, as Maradona and the Argentine forwards try to get the defending World Cup champions off on the right foot.
