AFCON 2015: Why Aaron Samuel’s goal is golden

While watching the Nigeria versus Congo game last Saturday, a friend of mine nearly had a heart attack when Egyptian referee Gehad Grisha adjudged Godfrey Oboabona to have handled in the box (although television replays showed the ball had hit him in the mid-riff) and pointed to the penalty spot for a penalty just six minutes after Ikechuckwu Uche had given the Super Eagles the lead.

His heart practically stopped beating until Vincent Enyeama (God bless him) guessed correctly and dived low to keep out Thievy Bifouma’s penalty. With that done and Nigeria retaining her lead, my friend kept urging the Super Eagles to lock down the game and see out that victory, slim as it may be. His reason: if we cannot score anymore, then we should not allow the Congolese back into the game.

However, that thinking that Stephen Keshi should park the bus was faulty as a 1-0 win would not have been enough to see us go ahead of the Congolese. And, to his credit, Keshi knew we were skating on thin ice if we relaxed and thought we were home and dry with that slim one goal lead.

One, a one goal lead is easy to cancel and the Congolese were swarming all over the Eagles like bees and could have equalized but for the exceptional brilliance of Enyeama. Two, and more crucially, a second goal will break the resistance of the opposition and drain their fighting spirit.

So Aaron Samuel, burly and built like a tank, was brought on and after setting up Uche with a gilt-edged opportunity which the Villarreal man blasted over the post, the Guangzhou R&F of China striker curled in a left-footer with less than three minutes left on the clock.

It was his second goal in as many matches and, though a bright future lay ahead of the 20-year old in the national team, it may be his most important goal yet except, say, he scores the winning goal in the final of the next World Cup.

With that goal, Nigeria now moves ahead of the Congolese (see table). Yes, we are ahead of them, but that’s not because we have a +2 goals difference while they have a -1 GD. According to the CAF rules, the relevant portion which I have excerpted here, when two or more teams are tied on the same number of points, a tie-breaker is to be employed to separate them.

Let me walk you through the Article 14 of CAF’s Regulations of the Orange Africa Cup of Nations and how it would be applied to separate Nigeria and Congo should we still be locked on the same number of points after Wednesday’s games.  What I will do is take the subsections one after the other and explain how it applies to the case at hand.

Nigeria lost 2-3 at home in the first leg but won 2-0 away in Point Noire which means that the Super Eagles now hold a +1 goal advantage over their opponents. With this, all Nigeria needs to do is to match whatever result the Congo can get against Sudan when we play South Africa on Wednesday.

Aaron Samuel’s last minute goal ENSURED that we now have a better goal advantage against Congo. We lost 2-3 at home and won 2-0 away for a 4-3 goals aggregate so we scored more goals (4) than Congo (3).

If the game had ended 1-0, we would be on 3-3 goals aggregate BUT the Congolese would have been ahead of us due to the away goals rule because they scored more away goals (3) to our (2).

But for Aaron Samuel’s goal, we would have been forced to adopt this criterion which looks at who has the better goals difference in all the group matches (not necessarily the games between the two teams) and though we would have had a +1 and Congo 0 GD, it would have been rendered meaningless because Article 14:4 would have taken effect and rendered this one meaningless.

As it were, we also lead on this score with six goals (minus Samuel’s goal) to Congo’s five but like I said, this wouldn’t have mattered because of Article 14:4 as above.

If, on match day 6 we are still tied with Congo, CAF would have been forced to separate us by using the last criterion which is the drawing of lots to determine who goes through between the two teams. Then, it would have come down to pure luck and not who has the best collection of players or who are the defending champions. That means that the destiny of a whole country of almost 170million would have been decided by the toss of a coin. But, luckily, Aaron Samuel saved us those blushes.

If that had happened again, it would be a second time unlucky for John Mikel Obi who was a prominent member of the 2003 Eaglets whose hearts were broken in Finland.