MSL Voters All Hail Victor : Indoor soccer: Sockers goalkeeper Nogueira named league MVP, giving the team a sweep of individual postseason awards.
They enlarged the goals by 33% and jury-rigged some rules before the MSL season to inject more offense into indoor soccer.
Despite the rules committee’s best effort, Sockers goalkeeper Victor Nogueira managed to make his goals-against average look like an economic indicator--it kept falling, finally settling at 4.37. It was quite a feat in a league where GAAs were expected to balloon like the budget deficit.
So on Thursday the MSL announced that Nogueira was the recipient of its most prestigious postseason award. Meet Victor Nogueira, the MSL’s Most Valuable Player.
“This really comes as a surprise,” Nogueira said. “This is the type of award that a goalkeeper normally wouldn’t even have a shot at. San Diego has always had one of the best defenses in the league, and I’ve got to give most of the credit to the guys in front of me. Without their effort and hard work, we wouldn’t have been able to set the records that we have.
“The things we’ve achieved were done as a team and that’s really we’re the credit should go--to the team.”
He spent the season deflecting shots, and now he’s deflecting praise. But Nogueira’s talk of team work may be more than just rhetoric.
Nogueira’s award was the third bestowed upon a Socker employed to keep the other guys from scoring. Earlier this week, defender David Banks was named Rookie of the Year, and Kevin Crow was named Defender of the Year.
Along with Ben Collins, who played his first full season on defense, the three formed the core of a Socker defense ranked No. 1 in the league.
A surprise? Yes.
“You just have to look back and see how we looked at the beginning of the season,” said Coach Ron Newman.
The Sockers looked like the patchwork team they were forced to become by the league’s ever-shrinking salary cap. They lost four of their first five games and allowed 29 goals in doing so.
“We didn’t look like we had the best goalkeeper in the league at that point,” Newman said. “We didn’t look like we had the best defender. We didn’t look like we had the rookie of the year. And we certainly didn’t think we would be the best team in the division. It’s amazing how we’ve turned all this around.”
And because they did, Nogueira was in position to become only the second non-forward to win the MVP in the league’s 13-year history.
The other non-forward was also a Socker goalie. Alan Mayer won it after he set a record for most victories in a season, 30, in 1982-83.
Mayor’s record no longer stands. Nogueira had 31 this season.
Perhaps more impressive were Nogueira’s two shutouts. He is the only MSL goalie ever to record more than one in a season, and he has done so three times.
The rules changes didn’t help goalies, either. The goals were enlarged, and defenders were required to stand 15 feet from the ball on direct free kicks, rather than 10 as in the past. The changes were expected to add more scoring to the league. Shutouts were expected to be a thing of the past.
But Nogueira recorded his seventh and eighth shutouts of his career anyhow, surpassing St. Louis’ Slobo Ilijevski as the league’s all-time shutout leader.
“I think he is getting better (as he’s getting older),” Newman said of the 31-year-old veteran of eight years. “I remember when he played for Chicago (1982-87), I thought he was good, but not great. Now he is great. He’s got those long arms, which are always useful to a goalkeeper, and a dominating figure (6-0, 180). I think opposing players think they can’t get it past him.”
Nogueira led the league with 576 saves, few of which were of the acrobatic variety. Nogueira is one of those guys who creates his own luck by being in the right place at the right time.
It’s not so much that he cuts down shooting angles. He seems able to sever them altogether.
“Because he has played so many times against all the great players,” Newman explained. “He pretty much knows what their next moves are going to be.”
It appears Nogueira also knows what the next moves of his teammates are going to be, which would explain why he led the MSL in one other category--assists by a goalie. Nogueira had nine.
Socker Notes
Socker midfielder Brian Quinn wound up second in MVP voting, which is done by beat writers throughout the league. Quinn finished with three first-place votes to Victor Nogueira’s seven. . . . By the time the championship series begins (Friday, May 10, at the Sports Arena), the Sockers will have had a two-week layoff since finishing off the St. Louis Storm in five games in the Western Division finals.
