Equatorial Guinea led 1:0 until the 95th minute with a goal by Marvin Anieboh, but Burkina Faso turned the tables with goals in the 95th and 98th minutes. First, Georgi Minoungou scored for the equalizer, while Edmond Tapsoba scored for the win and a big celebration.
This is how an incredible sports story was written today, because the 23-year-old Minoungou is a player who sees in only one eye. In 2022, he moved from the second Czech league to the Seattle Sounders reserve team in the USA. After a year and a half, he was promoted to the first MLS team and traveled to Marbella for training, but the trip turned into a nightmare.
After a few training sessions, his eye started to swell and itch due to an infection. Although he didn’t think it was anything serious at first, the condition suddenly worsened. “It turned black, then red. After two weeks it was completely white,” he told Sport Bible in June.
Even emergency surgery failed to save his left eye because the nerves had completely died.
The doctors told him that he would never be able to play football again, but he did not want to accept that. He asked the club to allow him to continue coaching. “I said, ‘If I’m good, I keep going. If I’m not, I stop.’” And he was good.
“I trained harder than ever before. I couldn’t see everything anymore, but I could feel the game. I could read it. I adapted. It’s amazing what the brain can achieve. Sometimes I don’t see the defender at all – I feel him. Then I just go the other way. Instinct, game review, feeling – it all comes together,” he explains.
The fact that today he is a five-time national team member and top scorer at the African Cup of Nations, he owes to the World Club Championship held last summer. “This tournament made me famous, because MLS is not always followed closely,” he explained in an interview with the Confederation of African Football.
The national team of Burkina Faso, for which he plays even though he was born and raised in the Ivory Coast, is now surely happy that their hero has been discovered in far away America.
(Vijesti.ba)
