SEBASTIÁN ABREU
“Recordar é viver, Loco Abreu acabou com você” (Remember and live, Loco Abreu destroyed you). That was the song Botafogo fans sang at their Flamengo counterparts in the years after Sebastián Abreu scored the most significant goal in the club’s recent history. For the previous three seasons, Flamengo had beaten Botafogo to the Carioca state championship—in fact, Flamengo had won the last eight when the title had come down to those two sides—and the Botafogueses were hurting.
Abreu was nicknamed “El Loco” mainly because he was outspoken. The fact his opinions were often intelligent was beside the point. He disregarded convention, and chose the number 13 shirt on joining his new club in January 2010. Now thirty-four, it seemed he was just winding down his career. Three months later, Botafogo needed to beat Flamengo at the Maracanã to be certain of the title.
At halftime the score was 1–1. In the second half, Botafogo were awarded a penalty, and Abreu stepped up. He ran at pace, Flamengo goalkeeper Bruno dived early, and Abreu lofted a left-footed Panenka down the middle so smartly that it shaved the underside of the crossbar and with so much backspin that it did not even touch the back of the net. There was time for Adriano, of Flamengo, to miss a penalty before Botafogo won 3–1. Abreu’s place in club folklore was sealed. He remains a club idol. Botafogo even adopted a sky-blue shirt to represent Abreu’s Uruguay shirt for away matches.
In South America, the Panenka is called the cavadinha—the literal meaning is “little dig”—and Abreu had seen it at close quarters, from Djalminha, the Brazilian forward. Djalminha’s first cavadinha was in October 1995, for Guarani against Internacional, whose goalkeeper Andoni Goycochea was famed as a penalty specialist. There were four key rules Djalminha laid down for his perfect cavadinha:
1. Observe the goalkeeper’s behavior and if he waits until you kick the ball to dive, then avoid the cavadinha. If he goes early, try it.
2. It’s all about the speed as you approach the ball. You have to run fast.
3. Don’t try it every time, as the goalkeeper will soon notice. I never did it two penalties in a row.
4. The above is all theory. What matters is your personality, your intuition and your emotion.
Abreu spent only six months at Deportivo La Coruña alongside Djalminha, but it was long enough to learn from the Brazilian. The pair would stay behind after training and hone their technique in front of Deportivo’s two African goalkeepers, Jacques Sango’o and Peter Rufai.
It was ironic, then, that another African goalkeeper, Ghana’s Richard Kingson, was the victim of Abreu’s ultimate penalty. Kingson had clearly not seen Abreu’s spot kick against Flamengo. He hadn’t watched Botafogo play Fluminense either, when Abreu had one cavadinha saved and three minutes later took another penalty, another cavadinha, and scored. He didn’t know about Abreu’s first successful cavadinha, in 1999, when he was at Tecos and needed one more goal to finish top scorer in the Mexican league; or five years later, the cavadinha that Deportivo Toluca’s Hernán Cristante saved as Tecos fought to avoid relegation. Abreu was vilified, but one week later scored the headed winner against Puebla that kept Tecos up. He left the club straight after the game, accusing the fans of hypocrisy. In all, Abreu had taken twenty-four cavadinha penalties and he had scored with twenty-two of them.
When Uruguay faced Ghana in that controversial 2010 World Cup quarterfinal, after John Mensah and Dominic Adiyah had missed in the shoot-out, and as Abreu stood over the ball, needing to score to send Uruguay into the last four, still Kingson didn’t know. Everyone in the Uruguay team knew, though.
Abreu had taken, and missed, three penalties in training the day before the game. One was to the left, one to the right, and one down the middle. Sebastián Eguren, his teammate, had shouted over, “Hey man, stop mucking around, we might need you tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry, tomorrow we will win with my signature penalty,” came the reply.
“Please don’t do that to me!” Eguren said. “Or at least let me know first: I will need to take a tablet to calm my heart!”
As the shoot-out progressed, Abreu had noticed that Kingson was moving early. He’d turned to his neighbor Jorge Fucile after Diego Forlán scored Uruguay’s first penalty and asked, “Did you see what I just saw, Jorge? He moved before the shot, right?”
“Yes, Loco, he moved early then.”
After Mauricio Victorino scored: “He dived early again, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
Fucile also agreed after Andrés Scotti scored the third penalty. But that was enough for him.
“Hey, Loco, kick the cavadinha if you want to, but stop breaking my balls with these damn questions,” he said.
As Abreu walked to the spot, Forlán turned to his teammates and muttered, “Please don’t try a cavadinha, please, please, please!”
Uruguay coach Oscar Washington Tabarez had asked Abreu to take the third penalty, but he wanted to take the fifth. Abreu remains convinced that Tabarez knew what he was going to do.
He spots the ball slowly, deliberately, and takes seven steps back. He never looks at the goalkeeper and appears in total control. His run-up is long, starting outside the area, and one step before Abreu reaches the ball, Kingson makes his move, slightly forward and to his right. Abreu has read it perfectly. His cavadinha is not as high, or as slow, as against Flamengo, but it has the same outcome.
“I tried to be logical in an illogical situation,” Abreu explained. “It was the last penalty and I thought that Kingson would be logical and dive to one side. I thought there was no way he would think that I would take such a risk with the last penalty in such a game.”
That’s the kind of lucidity and composure under pressure that lands you with the nickname “El Loco.”
“People think I’m crazy but I have never heard anyone say the same of Zinedine Zidane when he took his penalty in the [2006] World Cup final,” he reasoned. “Zidane was a genius, but Abreu, man, he was crazy.”