Matthieu Epolo heaved a huge sigh of relief when VAR invalidated Adriano Bertaccini’s goal on Saturday. He’s going to have to come out stronger.
Since the start of the season, we felt that Matthieu Epolo, at one point or another, was going to end up making a fatal blunder. Fabulous on his line, sometimes hastily presented by some as one of the best goalkeepers in Belgium, Epolo also has enormous flaws, such as a lack of concentration and sometimes frankly questionable decision-making.
It’s the kind of thing that “feels”: if we know that Epolo is capable of stopping almost any ball, we “feel” that at his age, he has not yet evacuated the danger factor of his game. Last season, his occasional blunders with SL 16 went unnoticed in the anonymity of the Challenger Pro League.
This season, he is in the spotlight, at only 19 years old. Can he manage this pressure, that of an entire stadium which has come both to expect miracles from him but also to fear this type of error? Succeeding a “darling child” of Sclessin like Arnaud Bodart is not easy.
A blunder that could have destroyed Epolo
Last Thursday, in the Cup, we said to ourselves that the fairy tale continued. If Epolo started to come away from penalties in extra time, mentally, he was strong, right? Saturday’s mistake hurt even more in comparison. Because it is almost inexplicable, unforgivable, incomprehensible: as they say, the guardian of Standard had a bug in the matrix.
And if this goal had been – as it should have been! – validated, there is reason to wonder to what extent this would have affected the career of Matthieu Epolo. A goalkeeper in his style walks on confidence; making such a blunder, which would have (even more) gone around the world, which would perhaps have created distrust between him and his audience, could have been devastating.
For this time, Epolo received a “joker”: he tasted humiliation, disappointment, he most probably took a blow from Ivan Leko and his goalkeeping coach in the calm of the locker room (the coach of the Rouches also handled the situation magnificently at the press conference)… but “it didn’t count”. After the equalizing goal canceled for Ludogorets against Anderlecht, David Hubert said an interesting thing: he was “happy” that this goal had gone in, because even if it had been canceled, the players had tasted disappointment during the VAR- check, and that woke everyone up.
Matthieu Epolo must take it in the same sense: he should remember the few minutes during which he thought he had cost his team two points. It is by engraving this in his memory, and by refusing to relive this sensation, that he will be able to grow from it and become a better goalkeeper.
