The Italian goalkeepers who played for months without conceding a goal

For much of the footballing world the infamous Italian defensive system of catenaccio was a decade-long phenomena whose tyrannical grip on the game was loosened firstly by Celtic in 1967, then broken for good by Ajax and Total Football in the early 1970s. The system that had brought so much success for Milan and Inter had run its natural course and lacked the flexibility to meet the demands of a constantly changing game.
The problem was that catenaccio’s descent into obsolescence was recognised everywhere in the world apart from in its own Italian spiritual home. Always more than a mere tactic, catenaccio was a placebo that marketed itself as a cure-all remedy for the nation’s football insecurities. Italians had long suffered a lack of confidence in their footballers’ ability to compete physically with foreigners and this inspired a counter-philosophy in which a minimum requirement of not losing was an acceptable compromise. Catenaccio had brought success and it proved to be a hard drug for Italian coaches to wean themselves off.
Fear of defeat and a dearth of innovation left the Italian game to limp through the 1970s, unable and unwilling to extricate itself from the ideology’s cold, dead grip. The ongoing obsession with a safety-first approach led to a drying up of goals, chances and often even shots. The beneficiaries of this near-pathological loss aversion were goalkeepers and this would be an era like no other for them to make hay statistically. The currency of the keeper is the clean sheet and for even the most mediocre of net-minders, clean sheets were very easy pickings in Italian football at the time.
Dino Zoff’s lengthy and successful career started during the early days of catenaccio. Along with the multiple titles he won for club and country, Zoff benefitted from the defence-minded culture, running up some notable statistical achievements. For Italy he still holds the record for the longest run (1,142 minutes), set between 1972 and 1974, without conceding a goal in international football. Simultaneously he was doing something very similar at club level for Juventus in playing for 903 minutes without conceding a goal during the 1972-73 season, the second longest sequence of this kind in Serie A history.
Zoff’s record is actually rather inconsequential if you look beyond Serie A. From the time the Genoa keeper Mario Da Pozzo extended the national record to 791 minutes without conceding during the 1963-64 season, this particular record would improve repeatedly over the next few years as a group of unknown lower division goalkeepers took advantage of the hugely favourable playing environment.
While the Italian game as a whole was locked in a defensive straitjacket, at least in Serie A there were world-class forwards such as Sandro Mazzola, Gianni Rivera, José Altafini, Pierino Prati and Luigi Riva capable of scoring against even the most massed of defensive ranks. Tactics were similar in Serie B and below, with defenders heavily outnumbering opposing forwards, but these teams lacked the quality of striker capable of individually bridging this sizeable void.
The names don’t exactly roll off the tongue: Boesso (Savoia), Vincenzi (Venezia), Chirico (Crotone), Basiani (Siena), Recchia (Formia) and Tancredi (Sambenedettese); unheralded keepers all, yet each managed an extended run of between 900 and 1,200 minutes without conceding. Towards the end of the 1967-68 season, Corsinovi from the minor Sicilian side Acireale raised the bar again with a new record of 1,228 minutes. Massese’s Serie C campaign in 1968-69 caught the eye mainly for the 1,266 minutes between goals recorded by their newly signed keeper, Marcello Trevisan.
Funnily enough, Trevisan moved on at the end of the season to Napoli to deputise for Dino Zoff, who was still a few years away from his own stat-busting peak. The following season the benchmark shifted again, this time to Antonio Gridelli of Serie C’s Sorrento. He knocked the previous record out of the park, bettering it by more than five hours and extending the Italian and world record to 1,537 minutes.
Gridelli’s momentous achievement would have endured if it hadn’t been for Lecce’s No1, Emmerich Tarabocchia, and some poorly behaved supporters in the south eastern city of Barletta. From the time in early November 1974 that Tarabocchia conceded a late goal during a Serie C match at Bari, five months would elapse until anyone else scored past him – the Benevento striker Cascella finally ending the run in April 1975. The new record was now a scarcely credible 1,791 minutes, nearly 30 hours of football or, if you prefer, just nine minutes short of 20 full league matches. It was also twice as long as the Serie A record then held by Zoff.
Tarabocchia’s record benefited from a generous slice of fortune. In February 1975, Lecce travelled to Barletta and the keeper’s lengthy shutout run appeared to end after he conceded an own goal and, later, a successfully converted penalty. Lecce’s last-minute equaliser secured a 2-2 draw but the resultant pitch invasion by angry home supporters led the Italian Federation to intervene and punish Barletta. The match was awarded to Lecce with a 2-0 scoreline, meaning Tarabocchia’s ongoing run without conceding was maintained, or at least reinstated through a technicality. Without this stroke of supporter-driven luck, Sorrento keeper Gridelli would have retained his record.
As it was, a Vasco da Gama keeper, Mazarópi, took the world record in 1978, beating Tarabocchia’s total by 25 minutes but this is a record list that Italians – or at least Italians from the lower divisions – still dominate. Tarabocchia and Gridelli still stand second and third on the all-time list, looking down proudly on big-name keepers such as Edwin van der Sar, Dany Verlinden, Abel Resino, Stoyan Yordanov and Chris Woods all below them in the pecking order.
• This article appeared first on Beyond The Last Man
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SOURCE : GUARDIAN SPORTS
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