Antonio Roma, born 13 July 1932, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
PART ONE
Antonio Roma turned professional with Ferro Carril Oeste in 1955, joining a modest club from the Caballito district whose home, still known today for the peculiarity of a railway line running directly behind one of its goals, offered no obvious platform for a young man dreaming of the national team. Nevertheless, and this is a point too often glossed over by those who fast-forward straight to his Boca Juniors pomp, it was at Ferro that Roma learned his craft match by match, season by season, and it was at Ferro that he first showed the qualities of positioning and bravery that would later define him.
Over four seasons with the club, right through to the end of 1959, he made 95 appearances in the first team, an unspectacular figure on paper but a substantial body of work for a goalkeeper still establishing himself. Ferro were then playing in the lower tiers of Argentine football, and Roma’s form between the posts played its part in one of the club’s proudest hours: the 1958 Primera B Metropolitana championship, secured after relegation from the top flight the previous year, and duly followed by an immediate return to the Primera División. It was a promotion campaign built on defensive solidity as much as attacking flair, and Roma’s reliability in goal throughout that season did much to earn him wider notice within Argentine football.
Indeed, so impressive had Roma become by the back end of the decade that the national selectors had already come calling before his move to a bigger club, a sequence unusual enough to be worth dwelling on. The sought-after shot stopper was named in Argentina’s squad for the 1956 Panamerican Championship while still on Ferro’s books, uncapped at that stage but evidently rated highly enough to travel with the senior side, and the full debut followed not long afterwards.
By 1957 Roma had earned himself two caps and a place in Guillermo Stábile’s squad for that year’s South American Championship, played in Lima and won by an Argentina side built around the fabled front line nicknamed Carasucias, containing Humberto Maschio, Antonio Angelillo and Omar Sívori among others, a team still regarded as one of the finest Argentina ever fielded and the first of that country’s legendary sides. Though Roma played back-up to Rogelio Domínguez of Racing Club during that continental triumph, squad membership alone secured him a Copa América winner’s medal at the age of twenty-four, a heady early honour for a goalkeeper still plying his trade in the Primera B.
At the end of 1959, with his four years of senior football at Ferro Carril Oeste complete, Roma was transferred to Boca Juniors, and here the story of his career properly gathers pace. He did not move alone; alongside him went a gifted young full-back named Silvio Marzolini, and the pair would go on to spend the whole of the 1960s as pillars of the same Boca side, Marzolini patrolling the left flank while Roma commanded the penalty area behind him. Roma made his debut for the Xeneizes on 3 April 1960 in a win over Estudiantes de La Plata, and from that afternoon onward the number one shirt at Boca belonged to him and to nobody else for more than a decade.
Argentine radio commentators of the period, reading out the Boca line-up before kick-off, would routinely begin with the same ritual phrase, naming the goalkeeper first and Roma’s name second only to the club itself in the football imagination of the era; contemporaries who kept the bench warm behind him during those years, men such as Néstor Martín Errea and Rubén Sánchez, managed barely a handful of appearances apiece across several seasons, so total was Roma’s grip on the position. Physically imposing, thickset enough that some team-mates and supporters simply called him Gordo, Roma played a bold and occasionally reckless brand of goalkeeping, throwing himself horizontally at forwards’ feet with a fearlessness that produced both spectacular saves and, on the newspaper back pages, spectacular photographs. It was this style of play, rather than any single incident, that gave rise to the nickname by which he became best known outside Argentina.
Within the dressing room and among the Boca faithful he had initially been known simply as El Tano, a nod to his Italian ancestry common among players of the period, but as his reputation for airborne bravery grew through the early 1960s, terrace wits began calling him Tarzán instead, a name that stuck fast and, helped along by the enormous popularity of the Tarzan films of the era, soon eclipsed the earlier one entirely. By the mid-1960s Antonio Tarzán Roma was, without serious rival, the most famous goalkeeper in Argentina.
PART TWO
His first league title with Boca arrived in 1962, a campaign that would also furnish the single moment for which Roma is most fondly remembered by Boca supporters to this day. With two rounds of the championship remaining, Boca and their fiercest rivals River Plate were locked together at the top of the table, and the sides met head to head at La Bombonera in what amounted to a title decider. Boca led 1–0 when referee Carlos Naí Foino, amid furious protests from the River players that Roma had strayed off his line, awarded a penalty to the visitors; the kick was entrusted to the Brazilian forward Delém, and Roma dived low to his right, turning the ball around the post and sending the Bombonera into such delirium that supporters spilled onto the pitch and delayed the restart by eleven minutes.
River never recovered from the psychological blow, Boca went on to beat Estudiantes de La Plata in their following fixture, and the 1962 Primera División title, Boca’s first since Roma’s arrival, was duly secured with Marzolini playing a club-record twenty-eight matches that season alongside him. Decades on, that save remains the single image most closely associated with Roma’s career, still recalled by Boca followers whenever his name is mentioned, and it did much to cement a growing reputation that had already, by that point in 1962, carried him onto the sport’s biggest stage.
Roma had in fact travelled to Chile for the 1962 FIFA World Cup that same summer as Argentina’s first-choice goalkeeper, wearing the number one shirt in a tournament that would prove a mixed and occasionally frustrating experience for his country. Drawn in Group 4 alongside England, Hungary and Bulgaria, Argentina opened their campaign in Rancagua on 30 May with a hard-fought 1–0 win over Bulgaria, the only goal coming from Héctor Facundo inside the opening five minutes and Roma keeping the clean sheet that secured the points.
Three days later, on 2 June, Argentina were beaten 3–1 by England in the same stadium, José Sanfilippo’s late consolation doing nothing to prevent Roma from picking the ball out of his net three times, and though Argentina closed their group programme with a goalless draw against Hungary on 6 June, that particular match was played without Roma in goal, his participation in the tournament ending after two starts rather than three. England’s superior goal average over Argentina, both sides having finished level on points behind runaway group winners Hungary, was enough to send the English through to the knockout stage instead of the Argentines, and so Roma’s first World Cup ended, somewhat anticlimactically, at the group stage, but not before he had shown himself equal to the step up from continental to global competition.
Back on the domestic front Roma continued to prosper through the middle years of the decade. Boca reached the final of the Copa Libertadores in 1963, only their second appearance in the fledgling continental club competition, having overcome Olimpia of Paraguay in a thrilling 5–3 tie along the way; standing between them and the trophy, however, were the holders Santos of Brazil, a side built around Pelé and widely regarded even at the time as one of the greatest club teams the game had produced.
Santos proved too strong across the two-legged final, winning 2–1 in Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã and 2–1 again at La Bombonera to complete a 4–0 aggregate victory on points, leaving Roma and his Boca team-mates as runners-up on the continent’s biggest club stage even as domestic success continued to flow. Further league titles followed for Boca in 1964 and 1965, taking Roma’s championship haul to three inside four seasons and confirming, were confirmation needed, his status as one of the two or three finest goalkeepers then operating in Argentine football, a status shared during that same period by contemporaries such as Amadeo Carrizo at River Plate, Miguel Santoro at Independiente and Agustín Mario Cejas at Racing Club, all men whose names still command respect among students of the Argentine game.
PART THREE
International recognition continued to accompany his club form throughout these years, Roma remaining first-choice for the national team through much of the first half of the 1960s, and by the time England hosted the World Cup in the summer of 1966 he had accumulated a wealth of experience that made him, once again, the automatic selection between the posts. Argentina’s campaign in England began in Birmingham, where a Luis Artime brace helped see off Spain 2–1 on 13 July, Roma conceding just the once.
Three days later, on 16 July, Argentina and West Germany played out a goalless draw at the same Villa Park ground, Roma keeping his second clean sheet of the tournament against opponents who would go on to reach the final itself. A 2–0 victory over Switzerland at Hillsborough on 19 July, goals again coming from Artime and this time also from Oscar Onega, took Argentina through to the knockout rounds with Roma having conceded only a single goal across three matches, and so it was that Argentina travelled to Wembley on 23 July to face the host nation in the quarter-final in reasonably confident mood. It did not go their way. England won 1–0 in a bad-tempered contest remembered chiefly for the sending-off of Argentina’s captain Antonio Rattín, and Argentina’s tournament, in which Roma had started and completed all four matches for a full 540 minutes across the two World Cups combined, came to an end at the same stage as it had four years earlier in Chile.
Taken together, Roma’s two World Cup campaigns yielded six appearances, three clean sheets and just five goals conceded, figures that speak to a goalkeeper of real substance on the international stage even without a major trophy to show for it; Argentina’s overall record across the group and knockout matches of those two tournaments, including the one 1962 fixture Roma did not play, worked out at three wins, two draws and two defeats, a solid if unspectacular return for a national side that would have to wait until the following decade and beyond for its eventual World Cup breakthroughs.
In total Roma won 42 caps for Argentina between 1956 and 1967, a period spanning more than a decade of service to the national team and one that placed him, alongside his Copa América winner’s medal from 1957, among the most durable Argentine internationals of his generation, even though the specific honour of representing his country at a second South American Championship, in 1959 on home soil, in fact eluded him: the squad that lifted that trophy for Argentina, managed jointly by Victorio Spinetto, José Della Torre and José Barreiro, did not include Roma’s name, the goalkeeping duties having been shared instead between Jorge Negri and Juan Carlos Bertoldi.
The second half of the 1960s and the turn into the new decade brought a further, and in some ways even more remarkable, chapter to Roma’s Boca career, one built less around individual moments of brilliance than around sheer, grinding consistency. In 1969 he produced arguably the finest defensive form of his career, keeping his goal shut for 783 consecutive minutes, a stretch of eight-and-a-half matches without conceding that stood as eloquent testimony to a goalkeeper still, in his late thirties, playing at the peak of his powers.
That same year Boca completed a domestic double, winning both the Campeonato Nacional and the Copa Argentina, and when the Campeonato Nacional was retained in 1970 Roma’s collection of honours with the club swelled to five league titles in total, a return matched by very few goalkeepers anywhere in the world across that era. Roma finally brought the curtain down on a career that had begun fifteen years earlier at Ferro Carril Oeste when he retired from playing in 1972, doing so as one of the most decorated and best-loved figures in Boca Juniors’ long history, a club record of well over three hundred appearances in all competitions standing behind him as proof of a rare and sustained excellence.