Will football’s biggest competition ever witness a ‘Cameroon 1990 side’ again?

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 like Cameroon stunned Argentina 1-0 following this header in the opening match of the 1990 World Cup in Spain. 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 instruction – who was easing himself into retirement by playing domestic football on the island of Réunion.

But in a world where you could find probably someone on Twitter providing match reports of the under-12 regional leagues from the Burkinabe town of Dedougou, there is the question of whether this sort of team will ever grace our World Cup coverage again.

Essentially, we know so much more about the world than we did in 1990, and manifest itself in football in a way that perhaps eliminates the element of surprise. Take the modern day Cameroon side as an example of this. Every single player who is likely to go to the World Cup plays in Europe, with only three domestically based players called up in the past year. Compare this to the 1990 side, where 11 players in the squad played for teams based in Douala or Yaoundé. Of course the counter to this would be the Senegal side in the 2002 World Cup, whose largely France-based squad surprised everyone watching, as they booked themselves into World Cup folklore.

But now with such excellent coverage of the French league, and the reduced likelihood of a World Cup squad being so heavily based in a single country, a modern day Senegal would be greeted with little more than a raising of eyebrows – before a keyboard warrior look to his or her laptop to moan about the “best” teams not reaching the final stages. Not that this extensive knowledge is a bad thing necessarily.

Whilst it probably does polarise the European leagues from the domestic African leagues, this can be seen as recognition for the ability of players from a wider range of contexts, producing an increased diversity of nationalities that I think we can all get on board with. By what if, hypothetically, history repeats itself. Say Cameroon beat a Neymar-inspired Brazil side in the final group game to get out of the group, and go onto make the quarter-finals. Will it be the same? Of course not. And again, this probably isn’t a bad thing.

If journalists are asking Nicholas N’Koulou after the game about how his team played rather than about rumoured West African tribal practices, it shows that the world has moved on a bit, and gained an increased respect for the football that comes out of African countries. But in terms of the romantic desire for something different, I think we have lost out here.

Football reflects the wider world in so many ways, including our unstoppable desire to gain more knowledge about more places that we don’t necessarily understand. But that 1990 team was special, and instigated an excrement of chemicals inside each fan’s brain to produce feelings of excitement, fascination and joy. Whilst our noble quest to satisfy our thirst for more information and knowledge to trump our friends at the pub/someone you’ve never met on social media, we have probably foregone that feeling of something fresh and new that got us all into football in the first place.