Cameroon, Serbia play out a 3-3 thriller

To put a lid on the Andre Onana controversy, Cameroon needed the kind of performance they produced they did against Serbia in an afternoon game at Al Janoub Stadium where fortunes yo-yoed before the teams played a thrilling 3-3 draw. Onana has been sent home but Cameroon are not done with Doha yet.

Till after the hour mark, it looked like Samuel Eto’o assertion that Cameroon could go all the way was just bombast of a federation president. They were down 1-3, Serbia having come back from Jean-Charles Castelletto’s 29th minute tap-in with two goals in first-half stoppage time through Strahinja Pavlovic’s header in the 45+1 minute and Sergej Miliknovic-Savic (45+3). When Aleksander Mitrovic made it 3-1 in the 53rd minute after Serbia exchanged passes in the rival penalty area, the Lions looked anything but Indomitable.

But substitute Vincent Aboubakar showed why they are called that, pulling one back in the 64th with a lob so insouciant that you would have thought he was showing off in his backyard. Got on to break the Serbian high line, Aboubakar, who plays for Al Nassr in Saudi Arabia, did that again in the 66th minute to set up Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting with the simplest of tap-ins.

Goalkeeper Devis Epassy, a French-Cameroonian who plays in Saudi Arabia, in his World Cup debut then kept Cameroon in the game with a 77th minute block to deny Mitrovic. And again in the 87th minute calmly cutting out Filip Kostic’s delivery from the left. Mitrovic was marginally off-side in second-half stoppage time but Epsassy took the shot on his face after the Serbian forward had broken through.

Epassy was in because Onana had left out of the squad following a difference of opinion with coach Rigobert Song. According to reports in different media outlets, Song and Onana had a shouting match at training on Saturday, the Ajax goalkeeper refusing to heed Song’s directive to hoof goalkicks instead of playing out from the back. Eto’o had tried to mediate but relation between player and coach had “irretrievably” broken down, the reports said.

Onana, 26, has served a drug ban, a 12-month sentence reduced to nine on appeal while at Ajax on whose rolls he was for six years. Onana moved to Inter Milan this season where he was the No.1 from October to the break before the World Cup. Onana’s absence at Ajax had given Maarten Stekelenburg’s career a second wind, the goalkeeper returning to the Holland side for the European championships last year.

Against the run of play, Cameroon forged ahead following a corner-kick that looked like a training ground routine with defender Castelletto tapping in a Choupo-Moting header flicked back. Among the Serbians who didn’t appeal for off-side was Milos Velkovic. The central defender had been caught ball-watching and blindsided by Castelletto. The bellow that followed in the live commentary of CRTV conveyed that it was Cameroon’s first World Cup goal since the 1-4 loss to Brazil in 2014.

Serbia too equalised from a set-piece. Dusan Tadic, a former teammate of Onana at Ajax, fired the free kick in and as Choupo-Moting jumped early, sandwiched between him and Andre-Frank Anguissa Zambo was Pavlovic who fired a powerful header. Zambo’s inability to get the ball out with a back-volley with two Serbians pressuring him led to the second goal where maybe because he was unsighted, Epassy only got a hand to Miliknovic-Savic’a low drive. Mitrovic’s goal came when Cameroon were dispossessed and then Serbia played four passes, three of them in the penalty area, before the goal. And then Cameroon showed lightning can strike twice in two minutes.

African teams at World Cups are often in the news for the wrong reasons, usually over players not being given bonuses promised. But they are also teams that provide colour and some of the competition’s most memorable moments. Think Cameroon in 1990, Nigeria in 1994, Senegal in 2002, Ghana in 2010. And after Monday, Cameroon in 2022.