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Former Cagliari player Comunardo Niccolai, who died today at the age of 77, is cited among football fans as a defender with a certain aptitude for own goals: today many newspapers in memory of him have called him “the king of own goals”, a definition that might seem to contradict the fact that Niccolai was actually considered a reliable and good defender. Despite this nickname, Niccolai is not the footballer who has scored the most own goals in Serie A, and in fact with 5 total own goals he is not even among the top ten, as can be read in a ranking on the specialized website Transfer market. At the top of the rankings are Franco Baresi and Riccardo Ferri, both at 8.
The 5 own goals scored by Niccolai are not very many considering that they were distributed among 225 games, just as it says little about Baresi that he scored 8 own goals in his 470 Serie A games. Franco Baresi was the captain of Milan in the 80s and 90s and is considered one of the best defenders in the history of football, and Riccardo Ferri himself, who played for Sampdoria and Inter, was considered an excellent defender. Behind them, the only two defenders who have scored 7 own goals in Serie A are former Sampdoria and Juventus player Francesco Morini and Sergio Santarini, who played for many years for Roma. Among several lesser-known names in the top positions of this ranking is Ciro Ferrara, former defender for Napoli and Juventus, with 6 own goals.
Niccolai’s reputation probably comes from the fact that his own goals were all quite spectacular. One of these in particular occurred during a very important match, the one between Juventus and Cagliari in the 1969-1970 championship, which ended with the first and only Scudetto in Cagliari’s history. Then there was an “almost own goal” by Niccolai that became famous for his clumsiness in a match against Catanzaro in the 1971-1972 championship: after hearing a whistle from the stands, Niccolai thought that the game had stopped and that the referee had whistled a penalty against Cagliari, which in fact had not happened, and he angrily kicked the ball towards his own goal. A teammate, Mario Brugnera, who noticed the misunderstanding, saved the possible own goal with his hands but thus earned a penalty for Catanzaro, which was then converted, making the match end 2-2 (up until that moment Cagliari had been leading 2-1).
Niccolai is still remembered as a strong defender, “the best stopper in the history of Cagliari”, he writes The Sports Gazette. Many other defenders in this ranking were excellent defenders, such as the Frenchman and former Juventus and Parma player Lilian Thuram, one of the best to have played in Serie A in recent decades (he also scored 5 own goals, like Niccolai). The number of own goals is in fact not so indicative of the strength and talent of a defender, because very often own goals happen in rather random ways or in any case due to forgivable errors, perhaps caused more by the skill of an attacker than by the defender who deflected the ball last.
Almost all the players in this ranking were active before the year 2000, and there’s a reason: until 1998, in fact, football regulations considered any deflection into a player’s own goal to be an own goal (therefore also many strikers’ shots deflected in an imperceptible or in any case non-decisive way). From 1998 onwards, only touches that are decisive in sending balls into the goal that otherwise would have ended up out are considered own goals.
2024-07-02 15:52:26
#Footballers #goals #Serie
