The video is already viral and his name has traveled the globe overnight. Ivan Provedel, a 29-year-old Italian goalkeeper with a winding career, offered Lazio Rome an unexpected draw against Atlético Madrid (1-1) by equalizing with a header on the last action of the match, Tuesday during the first day of the Champions League.
For its return to the premier competition of European football after two seasons of absence, Lazio went through all the states: euphoric during the first quarter of an hour, dejected after the opening score by Atlético and finally incredulous at the end of the match after his goalkeeper’s exploit.
With only a minute left in added time, Provedel saved his team by heading, like a centre-forward, a perfect cross from Luis Alberto with a header to beat his counterpart Oblak. “It’s an incredible emotion, I get chills, I’m not used to scoring and I don’t realize it yet. When I saw that there was a corner, I went up to go all out,” he first declaredbefore entering into a tactical-tactical analysis which suggests that this goal was not a fluke.
“I can say that I have studied Immobile’s (Lazio striker) way of playing well, I see him doing these movements every day. I saw that Luis Alberto had the ball and he used to shoot at the far post, so I positioned myself and went for it. »
Already a scorer in 2020
Perhaps the craziest thing about this story is that it was the Italian goalkeeper’s first match in the Champions League. At 29 years old, the tall 1.94m goalkeeper took a while to establish himself and traveled all over Italy (Verona, Pisa, Perugia, Modena) before settling down at Lazio in the summer of 2022 and to be the titular goalkeeper ever since. And in just one match, he joins the very small group of goalkeepers who have scored in the Champions League.
Certainly, he remains far behind the German Hans-Jörg Butt (Hamburg, Leverkusen, Bayern), who was used to taking penalties and scored three times in “C1”. But he equals former Lille goalkeeper Victor Enyeama, who scored against Lyon from the penalty spot in the group stage with Hapoel Tel-Aviv in 2010, and the lesser known Autre Bolat, Standard de Liège goalkeeper who scored on a corner against in Alkmaar in 2009.
Another proof of Provedel’s offensive “talent”: he is a repeat offender. It is in fact not the first time that he has scored a goal like this. In 2020, while playing for Juve Stabia in the Italian second division, he also got the upper hand over all his opponents at Ascoli to equalize a few seconds before the end of the match.
“There is no ranking of the two goals I scored, they are both very important for me and they were scored in two different situations,” he concludes. We can agree with him on one thing: between the one scored in Serie B and the one in the Champions League, there is only one who has traveled the world.
