It’s His Turn
So, what’s the difference between the best soccer goalie to pull on the gloves for the United States and the average American?
During the summer of 1994, during America’s World Cup, not much.
“I was doing a lot of things,” Kasey Keller recalls. “I went to a friend’s wedding in Atlanta. I watched the U.S. game against Colombia in L.A. I went to Orlando and spent a few days at Disney World and watched a few games there. I went to Bermuda for my wedding anniversary. Then I went home for a week or two.”
Keller had a lot of time on his hands, because he didn’t have a ball in his hands. That was because Bora Milutinovic, the mysterious man who coached the U.S. national soccer team in 1994, worked a bit of irrefutable magic that summer--finding not one, not two, but three American-born goalkeepers he’d rather have on his team than Keller.
In soccer terms, this is a little like Phil Jackson assigning Michael Jordan to fourth-string shooting guard.
While Keller was creating an international reputation as a shot-stopper for the English club Millwall--soon to join Leicester City and become the first American goalie to start in the prestigious English Premier League--Milutinovic went to the World Cup with Tony Meola, Brad Friedel and Juergen Sommer as his goalkeeping contingent.
There, Meola created an international reputation of another kind. “Near Post Meola” became the mocking moniker after that U.S. starter yielded three goals of that variety against Switzerland, Romania and Brazil--goals that still haunt American soccer fans, and Keller, four years hence.
“What was difficult,” Keller says, “is that I think I could have helped the team. That was tough. If it was by playing or by experience or whatever, it just would have been nice to be given the opportunity to try to help.
“It wasn’t to be.”
Keller was the John Harkes of ‘94, the most conspicuous American MIA at the World Cup. Now entrenched as the U.S. starter--many consider him to be among the top half-dozen goalkeepers in the world--Keller still hasn’t shaken the sting of being bypassed by Milutinovic, still is perplexed about his summer in exile four years ago.
To this day, Keller maintains, Milutinovic has never explained his decision to leave Keller off the ’94 roster.
“None whatsoever,” Keller says. “I’ve heard he’s told people he made a mistake and this and that.”
Keller chuckles skeptically.
“I don’t think Bora ever admitted he made a mistake in his life,” Keller says. “It was a situation [where] I think no one really knows the reason except Bora.”
Keller has heard the speculation--that Milutinovic didn’t like his attitude, that Milutinovic considered him too cocky, that Keller had angered federation officials by not wearing gloves made by adidas, then a U.S. national team sponsor.
He doesn’t buy any of it.
“I’ve had reporters say, ‘We thought it was an attitude problem,’ ” Keller says, “And they interview me and they’d say, ‘Where’s the attitude?’
“Then it was supposedly a glove issue. I supposedly got in trouble for wearing a different brand than Adidas. At the time, you were supposed to wear exclusive Adidas everything.”
Pause.
“Except Tony,” Keller notes with a trace of bitterness in his voice. “He was allowed to wear his own gloves. But everybody else had to wear Adidas.
“In all honesty, I was told by someone in the federation that as long as I covered up my logo, I could wear these gloves.”
Ironically, the point became moot because, as Keller says, “Actually, I never even played.”
Sigi Schmid, an assistant coach on Milutinovic’s staff in 1994, acknowledges that the exclusion of Keller looks odd after the fact, after the soft goals against Switzerland and Romania cost the United States a chance to win its first-round group--as well as the chance to play someone other than eventual champion Brazil in the round of 16.
However, Schmid points out: “Goalkeeping is one of the strongest areas on the U.S. team. Goalkeeping is not going to make or break the United States in a World Cup.
“Meola was captain of the team and had been for a while, from ’92 on. You certainly don’t demote your captain just before a World Cup. Well, Steve [Sampson, the current U.S. coach] did it with Harkes, but that’s an unusual situation.
“Brad had been training with the team. And Kasey was not going to be brought in just to be No. 3. So from that standpoint it doesn’t look as bad.”
Schmid believes any of the four goalies in the U.S. pool in ‘94, “could start for half the teams in the World Cup right now. Scotland, Iran, Nigeria [which is now coached by Milutinovic]. I think Bora would cut off his right arm for any one of those four.
“Looking back, you ask, ‘Was Keller better than Meola?’ In reality, Meola was good enough to start for half the teams in the ’94 World Cup.”
Sampson, also an assistant on Milutinovic’s 1994 staff, has said criticism by Keller of Meola in ’94 bothered Milutinovic. Keller denies making critical comments of Meola then--although today is evidently a different matter.
Talking about the goals Meola allowed during that tournament, Keller says: “I mean, everyone makes mistakes. I think the thing that upset me more than anything else was that they were mistakes, but they were never owned up to as mistakes.
“I mean, when I kicked the ball off [Carlos] Hermosillo’s head [for a Mexican goal] during the first seconds of the Mexico game [during World Cup qualifying], you come in and say, ‘Sorry about that.’ You don’t come in and start . . . [complaining] at the guy that passed you the ball back and say, ‘It’s your fault that I kicked the ball off the guy’s head.’ ”
Keller said he “never heard” Meola own up to a mistake. “It was always, ‘The wall didn’t do this or that.’ To me, that’s [bad]. When you make a mistake, you just have to accept you made a mistake.”
Keller shrugs.
“Maybe I would have made those saves, or maybe the ball would’ve gone through my legs and we would have had the same result. So you never know.”
Milutinovic’s handling of his goalkeepers during the 1994 World Cup is believed to have influenced the decision of U.S. federation president Alan Rothenberg to fire Milutinovic in early 1995. As Bora said shortly after his dismissal, “All of America is happy. Now they have Kasey Keller.”
When Sampson replaced Milutinovic as national coach, he immediately restored Keller to the roster. Keller started in three significant U.S. victories in 1995--a 4-0 shutout of Mexico in Washington, D.C., and upsets of Chile [2-1] and Argentina [3-0] at the Copa America--victories that went a long way to helping Sampson earn the permanent head coaching job.
Yet, Keller and Sampson have had their awkward moments. During the first stage of World Cup qualification in late 1996, Sampson recalled Keller for a match against Costa Rica, but Keller, claiming he was hurt, remained with his English club team.
Then, on the same weekend Friedel was losing, 2-1, in Costa Rica, Keller was starting for Leicester City--prompting a miffed Sampson to bench Keller for the remaining two first-round qualifiers.
Keller describes the situation as “weird,” but downplays the conflict that developed between Sampson and himself.
“I got injured playing against Manchester United on a Tuesday night,” Keller recalls. “I was injured to about 60-65% and I asked Steve, flat out, ‘Am I going to be playing in Costa Rica at 65-70%?’ And he said, ‘No.’
“I said, ‘The difference is, if I’m 65-70%, I will be playing for Leicester City.’
“If Steve didn’t have confidence in Brad and didn’t have somebody else and said, ‘Of course you’d be playing at 65-70%,’ then I would’ve been in Costa Rica. That was the only issued involved. . . .
“I don’t think I was penalized [by being benched]. For the most part, we had already qualified and Steve just said, ‘If I have Brad come in and he plays well, I’m going to play him in the next game.’ I said, ‘I can’t do anything about that, you’re not going to play me anyway.’
“It was a little weird, I have to admit. But it’s nothing that I was overly concerned about.”
Keller firmly established himself as the United States’ No. 1 keeper with his most-valuable-player performance in the ’98 Gold Cup in February, which included a stunning 1-0 shutout of Brazil in the semifinals.
Keller turned back a bevy of Brazilian shots, including a point-blank blast by Romario from less than 10 yards that Keller snatched, with both hands, with a diving lunge.
Romario shook his head, paused for a moment and then extended his hand to Keller in congratulations. Later, Romario would call Keller’s performance “the greatest I have ever seen in a goalkeeper. . . . It was an honor to be on the same field with him.”
In its postmatch grades of the American players, Soccer America magazine granted Keller the Holy Grail of soccer ratings--giving him the almost unheard-of perfect mark of 10.
“I’ve had games where I’ve had to make four or five saves like I had to make in that game,” Keller maintains. “I don’t know how many were in that game, but there were quite a few.
“When you look at that and who we were playing against, that makes it probably the best game of my career so far.”
So far . . .
Keller may need a carbon copy, or two, against Germany and Yugoslavia if the United States is to have any chance of seeing the light of the second round in this World Cup.
Keller says he will be there.
At any rate, that amounts to a great leap forward from 1994, for both Keller and his country.
